Laine Welch

Alaska salmon fishermen harvested 114.5 million fish during the 2018 season for a payout of $595 million at the docks. That’s down 13 percent from the value of last year’s salmon catch.
A preliminary wrap up of the 2018 salmon season by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game provides summaries for every fishing region across the state.
It shows that sockeye salmon accounted for nearly 60 percent of the total value and 44 percent of the statewide salmon harvest. A catch of 50 million sockeyes added up to nearly $350 million for Alaska fishermen.
Chums were the second most valuable catch at $125 million and made up 18 percent of the statewide catch at just more than 20 million fish. Pinks accounted for 36 percent of the harvest and 12 percent of the value at nearly $70 million. Coho salmon comprised just 3 percent of the catch at 3.6 million fish valued at $35.5 million.
The chinook salmon harvest of 234,614 fish was the lowest since limited entry began in 1975, with a value of $16.3 million.
Salmon prices paid to fishermen increased across the board this year.
Chinook salmon averaged $5.98 per pound, compared to $5.86 last year. Sockeyes averaged $1.33, up 20 cents.
Coho prices at $1.34 increased 15 cents per pound. Pinks averaged 45 cents, an increase of 13 cents over last season; chum prices at 78 cents were up 12 cents per pound.
The dock prices don’t include postseason bonuses and adjustments and the salmon harvests and values will change as fish tickets are finalized.
Forecasts for the 2019 salmon season already are trickling in.
At Bristol Bay, a run of just more than 40 million sockeye salmon is projected next summer which would allow for a catch of 26.6 million fish: 26.11 million at Bristol Bay and 1.49 million in the South Peninsula fisheries.
ADFG said more salmon forecasts for the 2019 season “will roll out in coming weeks.”
Fish watch
Some major Alaska fisheries are winding down for the year, while others are still going strong.
In Southeast, a fishery opened on Nov. 8 for seven different kinds of rockfish.
About 170 divers are still going down for more than 1.7 million pounds of sea cucumbers, and more than 700,000 pounds of giant geoduck clams.
The Dungeness crab fishery is ongoing and Southeast’s golden king crab fishery ended district wide on Nov. 13.
Trollers also are out on the water along the Panhandle targeting winter king salmon.
Pollock fishing closed to trawlers in both the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska on Nov. 1. Ditto for cod except for boats using longline, jig and pot gear. Boats also are still fishing for flounders and many other species of whitefish.
Crabbers are close to wrapping up the four million pound red king crab fishery at Bristol Bay; likewise, the take of 2.4 million pounds of Bering Sea Tanner crab is going fast. No landings are reported yet for snow crab; that fishery typically gets underway in mid-January.
Fishing for halibut and sablefish (black cod) closed on Nov. 7. For halibut, 95 percent of the nearly 20 million pound catch limit was taken; for sablefish 79 percent of the 26 million pound quota was caught.
Homer regained its title as Alaska’s top port for halibut landings, followed closely by Seward and Kodiak.
The industry will get its first look at potential halibut catches for next year at the International Pacific Halibut Commission meeting set for Nov. 27-28 in Seattle.
Finally, the state Board of Fisheries meets in Dillingham from Nov. 28-Dec. 3 to take up 47 management proposals for Bristol Bay commercial, sports and subsistence fishery issues.
Fishing jobs jump
After a steep drop in 2016, seafood harvesting jobs grew 8.3 percent last year, the most in percent terms among all Alaska industries.
Harvesting hit a record in 2017 at 8,509 monthly jobs on average and jumped to nearly 25,000 jobs in July.
According to the state Department of Labor’s November Economic Trends, salmon fishing jobs grew overall but varied considerably by region. The crab fisheries had the only employment loss.
By region, harvesting jobs in the Aleutians jumped by nearly 20 percent, mostly through gains in groundfish catches.
Bristol Bay’s fishing jobs also grew overall by 6.2 percent.
The Southcentral region continued its trend of harvester job gains, adding 116 jobs for 7 percent growth.
Southeast Alaska’s fishing jobs were up by 7.7 percent with halibut harvesting growing the most by150 jobs.
Kodiak was one of the few areas to lose fishing jobs. While halibut and salmon harvesting jobs increased, losses in groundfish pushed down Kodiak harvesting employment by 81 jobs each month on average.
The Yukon Delta also lost fishing jobs in groundfish and salmon for an overall decline of 12.7 percent.
The November Trends shows that among all Alaska industries, seafood processing tops the list for injuries.
A rate of 8.8 injuries per 100 full time workers is more than double for other Alaska industries, and is 1½ times the national average for food manufacturing.
The magazine also spotlights the six small communities that make up the Aleutians East Borough.
Fish moves
Alexa Tonkovich is leaving the helm of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute to pursue a master’s degree in international business. Tonkovich has been at ASMI for nine years and has been executive director since 2015. She will leave her position in mid-December.
After more than a decade as director of NOAA’s northernmost research lab at Kodiak, Dr. Bob Foy has been named as Science and Research Director for the Alaska Fisheries Science Center.
Foy will be based at the Auke Bay lab in Juneau starting this month and will oversee nearly 500 employees at facilities in Seattle, Oregon and Alaska. Foy has gained international recognition for his work on Bering Sea crab stock assessments and impacts of climate change on crabs and other marine organisms.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Values for Alaska salmon permits have remained stagnant all year, except for two regions, and costs for halibut quota shares have plummeted.
For salmon permits, an off kilter fishery that came in 30 percent below an already grim harvest forecast kept a downward press on permit values. The preseason projection called for a salmon catch of 147 million this year; the total take was closer to 114 million.
“All of these salmon fisheries in the Gulf, both gillnet and seine permits, had a lousy year. And we see that in the lackluster permit market,” said Doug Bowen of Alaska Boats and Permits in Homer.
Farther west, Bristol Bay with its back-to-back record-breakers is an exception and permit prices there reflect increased buying interest. A scan of multiple broker listings show Bay drift gillnet permits at $165,000 compared to the $145,000 range before the fishing season.
Salmon fishermen at Bristol Bay pocketed a record $280 million at the docks, not including postseason bonuses, on a catch of 35 million sockeyes.
Bowen said more fishermen from regions of repeated poor salmon runs are eyeing Bristol Bay. His company has nearly 30 listings of Cook Inlet drift permit holders who want to exit that fishery.
“Folks are wanting to move out of the Inlet, which had another terrible year and go to Bristol Bay and people want to move from Southeast to the Bay,” he said.
Drift permits for False Pass (Area M) on the Alaska Peninsula also are increasing in value after several years of good fishing.
“We recently sold one for $175,000 which is $10,000 more than what the Bay permits are selling for,” Bowen said.
Permit prices remain stalled elsewhere. Prince William Sound seine permits have stayed at $165,000 and drift gillnet permits at around $150,000. At Cook Inlet, drift permits are in the $30,000 to $50,000 range. Kodiak seine permits have ticked up a bit to $28,000. For Southeast, seine permits are in the $210,000 to $250,000 range and drift gillnets at or slightly above $85,000.
Farther north, Norton Sound and Kotzebue again set records in their salmon fisheries, but permit transactions in those regions operate differently.
“There aren’t very many of them and not many change hands. When they do, a lot of those folks know each other and it’s word of mouth. So we’re not that involved in those permit markets,” Bowen said.
Higher salmon prices should show a big boost in the value of this year’s catch but it won’t make up for the shortfall in fish.
“It’s a matter of price and production,” Bowen said. “If you’re limited on how much you can harvest, that great price is not going to save the day.”
Catch share values plummet
High prices for halibut quota shares that one year ago were in the nose bleed area have now taken a nose dive.
“Negative news about recruitment into the fishery and more bad news about lower ex-vessel prices — that was enough to turn that IFQ (Individual Fishing Quota) market downward. There are some stiff headwinds for sure,” said Alaska Boats and Permits Doug Bowen in Homer.
Multiple broker listings show quota shares in Southeast Alaska (Area 2C) that for several years topped $70 per pound are now 20 percent to 25 percent less, in the $48 to $59 range.
For the Central Gulf (Area 3A), halibut shares have dropped 30 percent to 40 percent to $40 to $50 per pound. The value for halibut quota in the Western Gulf (Area 3B) is down 50 percent to less than $30 dollars per pound.
Surveys of the stocks in 2017 showed a lack of young halibut recruiting into the fishery and managers pushed for drastic cuts for future fisheries.
Then last fall, halibut prices dropped by $2 per pound at the docks and boats sometimes couldn’t even find buyers for their fish. Another broadside came from seven million pounds of cheaper Atlantic halibut from eastern Canada displacing Alaska’s fish in traditional U.S. markets.
The industry will get its first look at potential catches for next year at the International Pacific Halibut Commission meeting set for Nov. 27-28 in Seattle.
Chilling assists
The fisherman is the first link in the cold chain and refrigerated seawater, or RSW, is their go-to system. At Bristol Bay (and elsewhere), processors are now requiring that the salmon they buy from fishermen must be chilled, and they are paying nice bonuses for the better quality fish.
The chilling rate for Bay salmon jumped from 24 percent a decade ago to 73 percent in 2017, and it will surely be higher for this season.
Several RSW buying assists are being offered as more Bristol Bay boats acquire the chilling technology.
“The gold standard for Bristol Bay used to be 7.5 ton hydraulic, that’s what everyone wanted. It’s really changed a lot. Now RSW systems go from three ton electric to 12 ton diesel drive,” said Kurt Ness, director of operations and co-owner of Seattle-based Integrated Marine Systems.
One ton of refrigeration will chill 12,000 pounds of water and fish one degree in one hour.
IMS has developed a new system for smaller vessels, some dealing with RSW for the first time.
“Some boats don’t have the hydraulic power to power a traditional unit or don’t have the space for a larger diesel drive,” Ness explained. “So we came up with a three ton and five ton electric that can be run by a single faced generator so the footprint is much smaller. It’s designed for boats that pack in the 5,000 to 8,000 pound range.”
Costs for an RSW system can range from $15,000 for small electric units up to $44,000 for large diesel drives.
“There are a lot of other costs involved too,” Ness said. “There could be flush decking, insulation, maybe some hydraulic upgrades. You could easily double that just in terms of the actual installation itself.”
Despite the initial hit to the pocketbook, “practically to the person, everyone admits RSW is the best thing they ever did,” said Bristol Bay veteran Buck Gibbons.
With the quality incentives that many processors offer the difference can be upwards of 40 to 50 cents per pound. Last year, those who sold dry fish received around $1.25. Those who did everything right received $1.55 to $1.61. When you run that through 100,000 to 200,000 pounds, it adds up quick.”
To help defray the RSW cost, IMS is offering a $1,500 discount for Bristol Bay fishermen “for retrofits, new builds and everything in between” through March 1.
The Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, funded and operated by fishermen, also negotiated a bulk RSW purchase with Pacific West Refrigeration for 7.5 ton units for resale for $20,500, said executive director Andy Wink. Contact 907-677-2371 or email [email protected]
The Bristol Bay Borough also is offering a tax credit to fishermen in the Naknek-Kvichak District who install a chilling system by the end of this year. Participants will be eligible for a $1,500 rebate from the three percent fish landing tax paid to the Borough.
The Bristol Bay Economic Development Corp. is also offering a limited number of free RSW systems to qualified residents.
ASMI budget axed
The budget has been zeroed out for the state run Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.
“With zero state general funds, the fiscal year 2019 budget was reduced by just over $1 million. Every program took a reduction this year,” said Becky Monagle, finance director for ASMI at an “All Hands” meeting last week in Anchorage.
For fiscal year 2018, ASMI spent $16 million in marketing promotions and outreach at home and abroad. That was funded by $10.8 million from fisheries related taxes, $4.2 million from the federal government and $1 million from the state’s general fund.
Compare that to the budget of one of Alaska’s biggest competitors, Norway. That country imposes a small tax on its seafood exports that generates over $50 million per year to fund sales and marketing.
As with barrels of oil, all Alaskans benefit when the price of our seafood increases. The added tax revenues end up in state coffers to be distributed at the whim of the legislature.
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Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

“With fisheries, it’s almost the forgotten resource of our state as an economic driver. It’s almost like they are an afterthought. We have to realign that,” said Mark Begich, Democratic candidate for Alaska governor, as we readied for an interview during his trip to Kodiak last week.
Begich came to Kodiak despite the cancelled fisheries debate caused by a no show by his Republican opponent, Mike Dunleavy, who has not responded to requests to share his ideas and vision for Alaska’s oldest industry.
“I think it’s appalling,” Begich said. “I think it shows his lack of respect for our coastal communities and their importance to the economy of this great state and the people who live and work here.”
Begich spoke easily and at length on a wide range of fishing industry topics.
He called state funding for fisheries research and stock assessments a top priority.
“We are never going to be able to manage our fisheries resource the proper way without it. And I think there are opportunities through federal, state as well as foundation money that I believe is out there to help us do this,” he said.
Begich said he is a strong supporter of Alaska’s hatchery program.
“I know there is some conversation going on about hatchery fish impacts in the ocean … But there is no real science around that and the hatcheries have been very successful for us as a state,” he said.
In terms of selecting an Alaska Department of Fish and Game commissioner, Begich said good management skills and the ability to bring people together are critical.
“People are frustrated. They feel like their voice isn’t heard. We need commissioners who are willing to step up to the plate and recognize that it’s their job to bring people together, solve problems and move forward,” Begich said. “Obviously, I would want him or her to be knowledgeable about fisheries. We need someone who understands the controversies that are out there, the uniqueness of our resource, and how to balance it with making sure we do things for the long term and not for the moment.”
The average age of Alaska’s fishing permit holders is 50, and Begich believes the state can help fend off a “graying of the fleet” crisis and give young entrants a boot up.
“First we have to make sure the fisheries remain as stable as possible so future generations can get into that business. Another issue is the capital it takes,” Begich said. “We should look at how to utilize the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, which is a financing arm of the state, and is usually designed for big projects.
“We should figure out if they can be a player in helping to bring low cost capital to the table so that people who want to get into fishing have a chance and are not denied because they don’t have the money or the capacity to borrow. I think there is a tool here that has been underutilized by the state for the fishing industry and a lot of the small business industries that we have.”
The Trump Administration’s push for offshore fish farms gets a thumbs down from Begich.
“Alaska is known for our premium product because we are wild caught,” he said. “Farmed fish could impact our natural stocks if improperly managed. I don’t want any of that in Alaska, for sure.”
Begich also is no fan of Trump’s tariffs on seafood going to and from China, Alaska’s biggest customer.
“This spat that the president has with China is costing Alaskans jobs and money and putting a damper on our products,” he fumed. “With fisheries, if we’re not careful it could add another $500 million to $700 million to the cost of our fish products sold to China. What they will do is decide to buy products from another place and once they do that, we’ll lose our market share.”
“We should be teaming up right now with the governors of Washington, Oregon and the Gulf states, working with the Trump Administration and the State Department and start pounding on them that this is hurting American jobs,” he added. “These are dangerous games for us to be playing and the effects are long lasting.”
Begich said as governor, he would reinstate the coastal zone management program, which would bring back Alaskans’ ability to have input regarding management of our coastline. Alaska is the only state that does not have that outlet for the public’s voice. A coastal zone management program in Alaska was in place starting in the 1970s but expired in 2011 when lawmakers and then-Gov. Sean Parnell failed to agree on its extension.
“We need to have that coastal zone management program. It is about our own sovereignty in deciding what we want to do, and to have public comments on our coastal zone versus the federal government controlling it,” Begich said. “Secondly, it provides millions of dollars to the state that are rightfully ours and going to other states right now.”
Other protein industries, such as beef and pork, use everything but the squeal. But in Alaska, most of the seafood trimmings end up as waste. Begich called that “short sighted” and said he believes that there is tremendous economic potential for Alaska’s billions of pounds of fish parts.
“We need to have the financing available to build the infrastructure that will allow these companies to do maximum utilization of their seafood,” Begich said. “We also need to think about how we can use marketing in a way that helps utilize all of every product.”
Begich did not hesitate when asked what he views as the biggest threat to Alaska’s fisheries.
“Climate change,” he said. “Ocean acidification, warming waters — these are things that right now we don’t have enough information about to understand what the long term impacts are going to be, and it is clear that there are going to be impacts.”
“The state must put investment into research and better utilizing our university so we understand what we can do, if at all, to mitigate the impacts of climate change to our fisheries,” Begich said, adding that the state also has its own goal to reach. “We have to get to our goal of 50 percent or greater of renewable energy so we can start doing our part in this world of making sure we put less emissions into the air.”
“We have to do it to prepare and protect our environment, our industries and our economy,” Begich said. “Secondly, we are the natural lab for a changing climate and we can become a leader in figuring out solutions to the challenges we face and show the rest of the world how to do it right.”
EM sign up
Pot cod and longline vessels fishing in federal waters were able to sign up by Nov. 1 for electronic monitoring of their catches for 2019. This year was the first time that the EM systems got the go ahead for use on boats under 60 feet; the program has now expanded to include more and larger boats.
“The cap for 2018 was 145 vessels. Since then the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in June increased the number of vessels that can participate in the EM pool to 165,” said Abby Turner-Franke, project coordinator at the North Pacific Fisheries Association in Homer, which has helped get the program out on the water.
Malcolm Milne, NPFA president, said the EM system is simple to use.
“Once your boat is wired you get a camera and instead of carrying a human observer, you just turn the cameras on and they record everything coming over the rails,” he explained. “When the set is done, the camera is off and at the end of your trip you mail in the hard drive to be reviewed in Seattle. It took a trip or two to get used to the whole system, but after that, you don’t even realize it’s there at all.”
In years of test trials, the EM cameras proved they could track and identify over 95 percent of the species required for fishery management decisions.
All costs are covered by grants from the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Rack up another empty seat on the Alaska debate stage for Mike Dunleavy.
The Republican candidate for Alaska governor bailed out of Kodiak’s traditional fisheries debate — after saying he’d show up.
“We plan on being there,” Dunleavy said on public radio’s statewide Talk of Alaska call-in show on Aug.31. But from then on, there was silence from the Dunleavy campaign as Kodiak organizers struggled to plan the Oct. 22 event that is broadcast live statewide on radio and television.
Days before the event, after weeks of unreturned phone calls and emails, organizers finally learned that Dunleavy would not be attending.
“Mike is unfortunately not going to be able to attend the debate as he will be visiting with Alaskans in Barrow. We wish you the best with you (sic) event,” wrote Gina Ritacco, deputy director of scheduling and events, in an Oct. 16 email to the Kodiak Chamber of Commerce.
The conflicting trip to Barrow was posted on the Dunleavy event calendar that same day.
“Certainly, it makes us in Kodiak feel like even though the fishing industry is so important to Alaska, it may not be that important to him,” said Frank Schiro, executive director of the Kodiak Chamber of Commerce which has hosted the debate since 1991.
Shiro added that he was not surprised.
“People had predicted from the beginning that it might not be to his advantage to come here. I think he believes he doesn’t need to pay attention to people down here and will walk into office anyway,” he said,
“We gave him two months to schedule it,” Schiro added. “The other two candidates for governor responded immediately and Dunleavy’s lag time made our planning extremely difficult.”
Since late March Dunleavy’s calendar shows that he has participated in a debate on rural issues in Naknek in early June and visited Juneau and Ketchikan. Besides that to date he had not visited any coastal communities beyond the Kenai Peninsula. Dunleavy also has not responded to requests for interviews by any media in coastal towns.
The seafood industry is Alaska’s largest private employer and second only to oil in the tax revenues it puts into state coffers. Seafood also is Alaska’s top export by far. Dunleavy has missed an opportunity to share his views and vision for Alaska’s oldest industry to a statewide audience.
Dunleavy is the first major candidate for Alaska governor or U.S. Congress to snub the Kodiak fisheries debate in nearly 30 years.
“We aren’t supporting a particular candidate,” said Schiro. “Our position is we want to have an informed public. It’s a shame that Mr. Dunleavy has chosen to not be a part of that.”
Hatchery reprieve
Two proposals to limit production of hatchery salmon were rejected by the Alaska Board of Fisheries at a special meeting on Oct. 16 in Anchorage. Both claimed that hatchery fish are straying and intermingling with wild stocks and are out competing wild salmon for food in the open ocean.
Typically, more than 30 percent of Alaska’s total salmon harvest each year is fish that began their lives in state hatcheries, mostly pinks and chums. Longtime studies by state fishery scientists show some straying of the fish but in very small numbers.
A proposal by the Kenai River Sportfishing Association asked the board to rescind an authorized 20 million increase of pink salmon eggs at a Prince William Sound hatchery. The group claims the fish threaten wild sockeye and king salmon bound for their region. It lost by a 6 to 1 vote.
Another proposal by former fish board member Virgil Umphenour of Fairbanks asked to cut statewide hatchery egg takes by 25 percent. That failed by a 5 to 2 vote.
According to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, which has tracked salmon abundances and catches for five countries for more than 25 years, salmon catches throughout the North Pacific remain near all-time highs and Alaska’s take tops them all.
The NPAFC also tracks releases of hatchery salmon from Canada, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the U.S. The five countries released just over 5 billion fish in 2017, similar to numbers over three decades.
U.S. hatcheries released the most salmon at 37 percent, followed by Japan at 35 percent and Russia at 21 percent. Chum salmon made up 64 percent of all hatchery releases, followed by pinks at 25 percent.
The half-day board meeting drew lots of support from fishing stakeholders. SeafoodNews.com’s Peggy Parker said when people in the packed room were asked how many depended on hatchery fish for their livelihood, more than half stood up.
Ugly crab is better
In the Bering Sea fisheries, crabs with ugly shells can comprise up to 30 percent of a catch at certain times of year and crab molting cycles. Shells that are discolored, scarred or covered with barnacles can be a turn off to customers, and fishermen get paid less for the so-called No. 2s, or dirty crab catch.
Alaska crabbers aim to get more value from the crab by convincing customers that it’s what is on the inside that counts in a Get Ugly campaign.
“We’re promoting it in a new way,” said Jeremy Woodrow, communications director at the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. “We’re educating retail and food service professionals that once you get inside the shell it’s no different. And a lot of times these ugly crab are older and have greater meat fill so they are actually a better value often at a lower price.”
The ugly crab campaign is modeled after similar “food enhancement” programs underway by farmers that is designed to reduce food waste and improve sustainability practices.
“Whether it’s produce or proteins, consumers are becoming more educated and definitely more thoughtful about where their food comes from. This dovetails right into that same mindset that it’s ok that your food might look a little different, it’s all about how it tastes and what it does for you as a person,” Woodrow said.
ASMI’s annual All Hands meeting is set for Oct. 29-31 at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage. The public is invited to attend.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Catches for next year’s groundfish fisheries reflect ups and downs for Alaska’s key species — pollock and Pacific cod — and the stocks appear to be heading north to colder waters.
The bulk of Alaska’s fish catches come from waters from three to 200 miles offshore with oversight by federal fishery managers. Their advisory arm, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, reviews stock assessments for groundfish each October and sets preliminary catches for the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea and updates them as new data become available.
If the proposed catches get the go-ahead in December, the Bering Sea pollock harvest will increase slightly to nearly 1.4 million metric tons, or more than 3 billion pounds.
For Pacific cod, Bering Sea the catch could be reduced to 350 million pounds, a drop of 64 million pounds from this year.
The cod numbers might change due to big differences between the 2017 and 2018 survey results in southeastern and northern waters, where large numbers of fish appear to be migrating. Over the year, the cod biomass dropped 21 percent in the southern region but increased 95 percent in the northern area.
The northern cod are genetically similar to the southern cod, making it unlikely that the fish hail from Russia or the Gulf of Alaska, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research biologist Ingrid Spies in a presentation to the council last week.
“What happens to those fish in the north is still an open question,” NOAA scientist Grant Thompson told Undercurrent News. “Are they spawning up there? Are they maturing and dying? It’s kind of uncharted territory.”
The numbers are more straightforward for pollock and cod catches in the Gulf of Alaska and reflect declines for both species. Proposed pollock catches show a 34 percent drop to 228 million pounds, a drop of 118 million pounds from this year. For Gulf cod, next year’s catch is likely to be down 5.5 percent to 27.2 million pounds, a decline of 1.6 million pounds.
One of the brightest Gulf of Alaska findings is the continuing upward trend of sablefish (black cod) seen over several years. The preliminary sablefish catch for 2019 was boosted by 40 percent to nearly 36 million pounds.
OTIS redux
Alaska lays claim to over half the nation’s coastline and a third of the U.S. exclusive economic zone, making it prime real estate for those wanting to get in on the push to develop our oceans.
That’s requiring new ways of thinking about traditional sectors such as fisheries, tourism, marine trades and oil/gas, as well as providing opportunities for new “blue economy” business ventures.
To hone a wave of entrepreneurs, a second Ocean Technology Innovation Sprint will task 30 Alaskans this month with finding a problem and creating a prototype solution for a venture of their choice. They will be assigned to five teams and meet one day a week for five weeks before revealing their ideas to the public.
While the meet-ups are mostly in Anchorage, teams also can connect virtually from anywhere in the state.
“The remote teams are live streamed to every event and they can work together on a digital whiteboard as if they were in person,” said Meg Pritchard, marketing and communications manager for the Alaska Ocean Cluster and OTIS co-organizer. “There was so much interest last year it has become a huge part of OTIS, because it’s meant to bring together people from diverse locations.”
The goal of OTIS, which is modeled after a Google Ventures program, is to create an “economic ecosystem” of innovators, educators, mentors and businesses to help grow new products from the bottom up.
Last year’s OTIS winner was a Sea Green energy bar made from 20 percent seaweed. Other teams created a bycatch reduction system using net cameras, a tidal generator and one group investigated using machine learning to count salmon.
Pritchard said connections are increasing across the state.
“There is a steadily growing network of people who believe that ocean technology and developing a blue economy is the way to move forward for Alaska’s economy,” she said.
OTIS is a partnership of the Alaska Ocean Cluster and the University of Alaska Anchorage Economic Development and Business Enterprise Institute. The Sprint runs from Oct. 20 through Demo Night on Nov. 20.
Winning women videos
Women who mend nets for a living in Vigo, Spain took home the top prize in the International Association for Women in the Seafood Industry video competition.
The contest was launched last year as a way to increase awareness about women’s roles in the industry and to recognize their value. This year’s contest attracted 15 videos (limited to four minutes) from around the world.
The winner, Puntada Invisible, highlights a woman named Beatriz who has been mending nets for 33 years, often outside in all weather.
“I think nobody is aware of how important our work is for the fishing sector, because everyone here looks at the fishing, the skipper, the boat, a good engine, a good engineer. Nobody looks at us here. We are totally invisible,” Beatriz said.
The second-prize winner was Mujeres del Mar del Cortés, a film about women in Santa Cruz, California, who formed a sustainable clam farming cooperative.
Two films tied for third place. Girls who fish in Petty Harbour is about women in Newfoundland who are mentoring others to run their own fishing operations and gain the experience and knowledge that has traditionally been dominated by men.
The Invisible Hands tells the story of Ratna, the wife of a fisherman from the Bay of Bengal in India. Tired of struggling to make ends meet, Ratna partnered with five local women and got a government grant to start a food truck called a “fish nutri cart.”
The women cook and sell their husband’s catches and are so successful they are applying for a second cart. The women said “their families now have enough to eat and their children are able to go to school.”
There was one video entry from Alaska called Copper River that showcased the life of veteran Cordova fisherman, Thea Thomas.
The judges were delighted with the breadth of the entries, said WSI president and founder, Marie Christine Monfort.
“A lot of effort is being put into tackling illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing around the world,” she told SeafoodSource. “We see WSI’s mission as tackling IIU – invisible, ignored, and unrepresented women.”
The top video took home 1,000 euros ($1,162) and 500 euros ($581) for second and third places and will be featured this month at the Gender in Aquaculture and Fisheries conference in Thailand, at the first women in fisheries international symposium in Spain in November, and at the international film festival of world fisherfolks in France in March 2019.
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Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Crab catches dominate Alaska’s fish news in early October as boats gear up for mid-month openers in the Bering Sea.
As expected, crabbers will see increased catches for snow crab after the annual survey showed a 60 percent boost in market-sized males and nearly the same for females (only male crabs can be retained for sale).
Managers announced last week a catch of 27.5 million pounds of snow crab, up 47 percent from last season. Even better, biologists documented one of the largest numbers of small snow crab poised to enter the fishery they’ve ever seen.
Also as expected, the news is bad for bairdi Tanners, the larger cousins of snow crab. A take of just 2.4 million pounds, down 2 percent, will be allowed from the western fishing district of the Bering Sea, with the eastern district closed for the season.
Crabbers breathed a sigh of relief to learn there will be a red king crab fishery at Bristol Bay with a catch of 4.3 million pounds, a 36 percent drop. Those stocks have been on a downward spiral for several years and talk on the docks was that there would likely not be a fishery this year.
“It helps sustain king crab markets that might be lost if the season were closed,” reacted Jake Jacobsen, director of the Inter-Cooperative Exchange, which represents the majority of Bering Sea crabbers.
There again will be no king crab openers at the Pribilofs and St. Matthew Island due to low stock numbers. Similarly, a king crab fishery was canceled at Southeast Alaska where a small 120,000-pound red king crab fishery occurred last fall for the first time in six years.
Looking good for Gulf crab
The official word won’t be out until November, but signs are pointing to another Kodiak Tanner crab opener in January 2019. Last winter saw the first season after a four-year closure, with a 400,000-pound harvest.
“It looks positive because we had a big group of crab last year that were just sub-legal, and we thought we might get two years of fishing on that group, said Nat Nichols, area shellfish manager at Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Kodiak.
A big pulse of crab in 2013 was the largest biologists had ever seen since trawl surveys began, Nichols said.
“At that time, we estimated 200 million crab in the water. They were one- to two-year-olds, the size of a nickel,” he said. “They don’t survive well because everything likes to eat a small Tanner crab, and about 90 percent drop out of the population before they reach legal size. But even 10 percent still turns into a lot of crab.”
Nichols said Tanner numbers also are looking up at Chignik and the South Peninsula, but those regions are likely to remain closed.
Biologists talk about “episodic recruitment” of Tanner crab, Nichols said, when massive spikes arrive all at once, roughly on a five- to seven-year time line. The largest one ever may be in the lineup.
“This year we saw the next recruitment pulse and it’s possibly 50 percent bigger than 2013,” he said. “But we’re looking way down the road to 2023.”
“We try not to get too excited because we’ve seen these drop off between the first year we see them and five years later when they become legal. But it’s good to see we’re still producing big cohorts of crab,” Nichols added. We’re sort of along for the ride, is how we put it.”
The abundance of tiny Tanners could be a benefiting from the crash of the cod stocks in the Gulf of Alaska, he said.
“If you’ve got 80 percent fewer mouths to feed, I don’t think it can hurt.”
Tanners, too, at PWS
Crabbers at Prince William Sound could also get to drop pots for Tanners again in March.
“We’re getting all our information together so we can see where we’re at,” said Jan Rumble, area manager for Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet shellfish and groundfish at ADFG in Homer.
A one-month fishery in March 2018 was the first Tanner crab opener in PWS since 1988. It was allowed under a Commissioner’s Permit that is issued in special circumstances and was limited to two regions.
It was a sort of fact finding mission, Rumble said, that was prompted by increasing numbers of crab coming up in subsistence pots and a lack of survey data. Fifteen permit holders participated in the fishery and pulled up 82,000 pounds of crab.
Rumble said based on last year’s harvest, managers are “pretty confident” there will be another special permit fishery next March.
“Hopefully, processors will come into Cordova and set up for that fishery again. We also had buyers in Whittier and Seward and they will appreciate the opportunity to buy Tanner crab again,” Rumble said.
Expo Updates
Pacific Marine Expo is one of the industry’s oldest (52 years) and most popular trade shows and organizers were scrambling a few months ago when its traditional November dates were spiked by a football game at Seattle’s CenturyLink Field where the event is held.
That pushed Expo into Thanksgiving week amid worries that it would cut into the show’s draw. The Nov. 18-20 date change hasn’t worked for some exhibitors, said Expo director Denielle Christensen, but for others, it’s provided more motivation to come to the show.
“Some folks are already traveling at Thanksgiving time, so this is actually a good schedule for them. No down time — you can go right from Expo to family and your turkey dinner,” Christensen said, adding that early registrations are ahead of last year.
Dominating the Expo floor again is an even bigger Alaska Hall, which will house 52 Alaska companies and the show’s main stage. Christensen said over one-third of the visitors at Expo in 2018 said they were “specifically looking for products from Alaska.”
A new focus this year is a Young Fishermen’s Track for those just starting out.
“We realized that was a group that was being overlooked. We know they need help and we hope we can be a bigger part of that for them,” Christensen said.
Also in the Expo line up: a public hearing on the Pebble Mine.
“Pebble Mine comes up every year and it is such an important topic to have in our educational program,” she said.
Visit www.pacificmarineexpo.com for more information.
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Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Offshore fish farms could soon dot the seascape along with those oil and gas platforms being proposed for U.S. waters by the Trump Administration.
The fish farms, which would be installed from three to 200 miles out, are being touted as a way to boost seafood production, provide jobs and reduce the nation’s $16 billion trade deficit due to America’s importing nearly 90 percent of its seafood favorites.
The U.S. Commerce Department is holding meetings around the country through November to talk about its strategic plan for getting aquaculture off the ground. At a recent session in Juneau, National Marine Fisheries Service Administrator Chris Oliver said that wild harvests simply can’t keep up with global demand.
“Aquaculture is going to be where the major increases in seafood production occur whether it happens in foreign countries or in U.S. waters,” Oliver said.
“Aquaculture would seem like an ideal industry for the country, since it has the second-largest exclusive enterprise zone in the world — meaning it has proprietary marine resource rights over an area totaling roughly 4.4 million square miles in three oceans, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico,” wrote Seafood Source.
However, the U.S. is a bit player in the burgeoning global industry.
In 2015, the U.S. produced just 0.4 percent, or 426,000 metric tons, of global aquaculture harvests, putting it in 18th place and trailing such countries as Ecuador, Malaysia, and North Korea. In contrast, the U.S. ranks No. 1 in the world in poultry and beef production.
The potential is not lost on America’s big food producers.
A new trade group called Stronger America Through Seafood has emerged to promote the push to farm the seas. Its backers include Cargill, Pacific Seafood, Red Lobster, High Liner Foods, Sysco and Seattle Fish Company.
“There is no clear framework for allowing offshore aquaculture development, so while the rest of the world is growing and evolving and exploring the open ocean as an opportunity to farm our own fish, the U.S. continues with business as usual,” said spokesperson Margaret Henderson. “And as our population and our appetites increase, we become increasingly dependent on foreign production.”
The group has come out in support of a bill pending in the U.S. Senate called Advancing the Quality and Understanding of American Aquaculture, or AQUAA, Act that would streamline the permitting process for offshore aquaculture projects. The act would create an Office of Marine Aquaculture within NOAA and provide a “one-stop shop” for federal approval of fish farm permits and “to the extent practicable,” avoid, minimize, or mitigate adverse impacts to the marine environment and wild fisheries.
During the Juneau session, Under Secretary of Commerce Timothy Gallaudet cited climate change in his pitch for the fish farms.
“Some of the changes in the environment are affecting fish stocks,” he said, “They are either moving or they’re not thriving and so aquaculture, done the right way and scientifically based, provides a means for employment of fishermen who are losing some of their gain through these changing conditions.”
Sam Rabung, director of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s aquaculture division, respectfully disagreed.
“I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to fight pretty hard to maintain the state’s opt-out option,” Rabung said, “and maintain the ability to prohibit finfish farming off of Alaska.”
Crab news
It’s a mix of good but mostly bad news for Bering Sea crabbers. The results from the summer trawl surveys showed “substantial” drops in numbers of king crab and bairdi Tanners. Conversely, the snow crab stock appears to be on a big rebound.
The news was presented last week in the annual Stock Assessment and Fishery Evaluation Report for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.
For red king crab, at the eastern portion of the Bering Sea more commonly called Bristol Bay, numbers of mature males dropped more than 40 percent from last year; mature females were down 54 percent. Even worse, the survey continued to show no sign of younger red king crab coming into the fishery.
“We haven’t seen recruitment in years,” said Bob Foy, director of the NOAA Fisheries lab at Kodiak and leader of the Council’s crab plan team.
In the report the team noted “it feels that the rather unusual environmental conditions in the eastern Bering Sea this year (e.g., elevated bottom temperatures, lack of a cold pool) and the model’s poor fit to the 2018 survey data increase the uncertainty associated with this stock and warrant additional precaution.”
The red king crab catch last year at Bristol Bay was 6.6 million pounds, a 20 percent drop from 2017.
For Tanner crab, the number of mature females dictates the fate of a fishery and those numbers declined 70 percent in the eastern fishing district, continuing a trend over several years.
The news was better for the west, where male Tanners held steady while females declined 14 percent. Foy also said there was a “substantial amount” of young crab poised to enter that region’s Tanner fishery.
“Substantial” also sums up the good news for Bering Sea snow crab. The summer survey showed a 60 percent boost in market-sized males and nearly the same for females. The SAFE report said the 2018 survey showed the largest mature male biomass since 1998.
Foy added that the survey “documented one of the largest snow crab recruitment events biologists have ever seen.” The snow crab fishery last season produced a 19 million-pound catch, the lowest since 2005.
The reaction from fishermen was mostly over “disbelief” in the king crab data, said a veteran Bering Sea crabber and industry advocate who asked not to be named.
“The survey results seem contradictory to what many saw while fishing last year,” he added. “Many believe a pre-season pot survey would yield a more accurate assessment of biomass. We respect the process and understand the reasons, but the dynamics of the Bering Sea are changing, and stock assessment methods may be less relevant than they once were.”
Bristol Bay booms
It’s a record-breaking payday for Bristol Bay salmon fishermen. The preliminary value of the sockeyes and other salmon they hauled in this summer topped $280 million, a first in the history of the fishery, and 242 percent above the 20-year average.
The 2018 Bristol Bay sockeye salmon run of 62.3 million fish was the biggest since 1893 and nearly 70 percent above the 20-year average, according to a summary by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. It also was the fourth consecutive year that sockeye runs topped 50 million fish.
In terms of catch, a harvest of 41.3 million red salmon was the second largest on record, after the 45.4 million fish taken in 1995.
Symphony seafood surprises
The call is out for new Alaska products to compete at the 26th annual Symphony of Seafood in Seattle and Juneau.
“Looking back over the years it is striking how new product development techniques and possibilities have increased seafood investments. It’s really heartening because that drives value and prices and continues to keep Alaska seafood relevant to consumers,” said Julie Decker, director of the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation, host of the event.
The Symphony provides a level playing field where new products from small “mom and pops” can compete on a level playing field with majors like Trident and Ocean Beauty. Products are judged by an expert panel in four categories: Retail, Food Service, Beyond the Egg (roe products) and Beyond the Plate.
“There are so many things being produced around the state, from kelp beer to pet treats, to things that are not edible …cosmetics, fish skins, things from crab shells — if it has Alaska seafood in it, it’s eligible for Beyond the Plate,” Decker said.
Symphony goers can see and taste the new products and vote for their favorites during Pacific Marine Expo (Nov.18-20), where the top winners will be announced. All others will be kept under wraps until the Symphony again moves to Juneau in February for another bash. That’s where second and third place and the grand prize winner will be revealed.
The winning products get more exposure with a free trip and booth space at the big Seafood Expo North America event in Boston in March.
“It’s a fun side of the industry where we all come together and celebrate the work that goes into developing these products, and the entire supply chain from when the fish is caught to selling it to customers at grocery stores,” Decker said.
Last year’s top winner was Alaskan Leader Seafoods for its Wild Caught Cod with Lemon Herb Butter and its Cod Crunchies Pet Treats.
Product entries and sponsors can sign up through October 19 at the Alaska Symphony of Seafood website.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

As Alaska’s salmon season draws to a close, lots of fall fisheries are just getting underway from Ketchikan to the Bering Sea.
Southeast is one of Alaska’s busiest regions for fall fishing, especially for various kinds of shellfish. Nearly 400,000 pounds of sidestripe and pink shrimp are being hauled in by a few beam trawlers, and the season for spot shrimp opens Oct. 1. Usually about a half-million pounds of the popular big spots are hauled up in local pots over several months.
Dungeness crab fishing also will reopen in Southeast in October, and up to 200 Southeast divers will head down for more than 1.7 million pounds of sea cucumbers starting Oct. 1. A 140,000-pound sea cucumber fishery at Kodiak attracts around 20 divers, and smaller cuke catches in the 5,000- to 20,000-pound range also occur along the Alaska Peninsula, the Aleutians and Bering Sea.
Divers, who received about $4 per pound for their sea cucumber catches last year, are likely to get even higher prices. The cukes are considered a delicacy in Asian countries where they are served in many fresh, frozen and powered forms. (See more about the amazing health properties of sea cucumbers below.)
A decrease in supply due to a heat wave this summer in China killed most of that country’s production and market reports show that dried sea cucumbers from Japan were recently selling for $126.50 per pound.
Alaska longliners have taken 78 percent of the nearly 20 million-pound halibut catch limit since the fishery began in mid-March, with less than 4 million pounds remaining. Seward, Homer and Kodiak were the top ports for halibut landings. For sablefish, fishermen have taken 61 percent of the nearly 26 million pound quota with Seward, Sitka and Kodiak receiving the most deliveries. Both fisheries end on Nov. 7.
Fishing for cod, rockfish, flounders, pollock and other whitefish continues in the Bering Sea. Pollock reopens in the Gulf of Alaska Oct. 1.
Bering Sea crabbers will find out any day the fate of a red king crab fishery at Bristol Bay as well as the catches for snow crab and Tanners. Those fisheries open Oct. 15.
Fall also marks the time for some of Alaska’s most important fish meetings. The industry will get a first peek at possible fish catches for next year when the North Pacific Fishery Management Council meets Oct. 1- 9 in Anchorage. Comments on all agenda items are open through Sept. 28.
Finally, the state Board of Fisheries will meet Oct. 15-19 at the Egan Center with an unusual lineup that includes a work session, Pacific cod issues and an open town hall meeting on Alaska hatcheries.
In its regular meeting cycle that begins in November, the board will address regulatory issues focused on state managed fisheries at Bristol Bay, the Alaska Peninsula, Chignik, the Aleutians and Bering Sea.
Sea cukes and cancer
Sea cucumbers have been considered a delicacy in Asian cuisine for centuries and also have been used in traditional Chinese medicine to help aid in many different health problems.
In his book “Cancer: Step Outside the Box,” author Ty M. Bollinger calls the spiky, slug-like creates a miracle cure for cancer.
“You can cook them for various dishes, but the way it’s found in local health food stores is dried and powdered and in capsule form,” he said, adding that dried sea cucumber extract is anti-viral, anti-bacterial and also has anti-inflammatory properties.
“Another of the fascinating things about sea cucumbers is that they are very high in chondroitin sulfate, which is commonly used to treat joint pain and arthritis. To my knowledge, they have the highest concentration of chondroitin of any animal,” Bollinger said in an interview.
While customers likely won’t see it on the labels, he added that powdered sea cucumbers also have many cancer curing abilities based on studies over the past 15 years.
“Number one, it’s cytotoxic, which means it kills cancer cells, and it also is immunomodulatory. So it has both sides of what I call the cancer killing coin,” he explained. “If you are going to defeat cancer, you need something that regulates your immune system to where it works properly but you also must have something that is going to kill those cancer cells. The sea cucumber does both.”
Sea cucumber extract also is used as an adjunct treatment for those undergoing chemotherapy, Bollinger said, because it’s very effective at mitigating the side effects of that cancer treatment.
Bigger home for baby oysters
Alaska oyster growers at Kachemak Bay near Homer could more than triple their production if they had a new FLUPSY. That’s a “floating upweller system” used to grow millions of tiny oysters after they leave their nursery tanks.
It takes up to five years for oysters to grow from microscopic to slurpable size, and the outdated system is taking a big bite out of the potential.
Unlike other shellfish growing regions in Southeast Alaska and Prince William Sound where farms are widely scattered, a dozen Kachemak Bay farmers used their closer proximity and formed a cooperative in 1988 to pool their resources and products. Since then the Kachemak Shellfish Growers Cooperative and its non-profit mariculture arm have grown to share a facility on the Homer Spit for processing, marketing, slurping, shipping and most recently, culturing local oyster seed.
“We should be independent from seed to plate. We are doing that now,” said cooperative president Marie Bader.
Roughly 3 million microscopic seed oysters are held in five 500-gallon nursery tanks where they feed constantly on algae for three months before transferring to the waters of Kachemak Bay. That’s where the FLUPSY comes in. The floating raft is run by a paddle wheel pump that provides a steady flow of water and algae to porous bins that hold the baby bivalves for a year.
“We no longer feed them when they go into the ocean. They depend on the water for their nutrients,” Bader explained.
The baby oysters are cleaned and graded throughout their year in the FLUPSY; when they reach fingernail size, they are sold to the farmers who grow them in floating lantern nets for at least two more years before they are marketable.
The Kachemak growers sold 150,000 dozen oysters last year. Orders online are advertised at $21 per dozen but sell locally for $14 to $16 at retail and “a bit less for restaurants,” Bader said. “At Pike’s Place Market in Seattle oysters are selling for $19 to $20 a dozen, so it’s a pretty darn good value.”
The group also sells oyster seed at $40 to $45 per thousand to oyster growers in Alaska and elsewhere, where demand exceeds supply. As the Pacific Ocean acidifies, oyster growers in Washington, California and British Columbia have struggled to get larvae to grow into seed, the stage when shells form, and are turning to Alaska. Upgrading their nearly 20 year old FLUPSY would help fill that need.
“Instead of 3 million, we might up it to 10 million, and we could space out the baby oysters more so they weren’t so congested in the few bins we have,” Bader said, adding that the FLUPSY is “on its last legs.”
“It’s been in salt water, it’s open to the elements, our workers have to boat over to Halibut Cove and are outside in rain and snow keeping that paddlewheel going in the middle of winter. We need a new facility that is enclosed so that our workers are out of the elements and our seed is protected,” she added.
A new FLUPSY is on Homer’s 2019 capital improvement list for a total cost of $175,000. City Manager Katie Koester called the co-op’s oyster businesses a “sparkling year-round addition” to Homer and said that “every cooler of oysters delivered to the dock represents $150 to the grower.”
Koester added that the local hatchery and new FLUPSY also can provide a great educational lab for high school and university students, who currently must travel to Seward for mariculture studies.
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Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Gov. Bill Walker christened Alaska’s first kelp-based beer during a recent swing through Kodiak.
The beer was created at the Kodiak Island Brewery using local kelp from Kodiak Island Sustainable Seaweed grown by Stephanie and Nick Mangini.
“Steph mentioned seeing a kelp craft beer on the internet and I told her to bring me 100 pounds,” said brewery “flow master” Chrissy Johnsrud, who created the new blend.
The beer, called Kelp Sea Level Gosé, is a sour, German wheat beer made with coriander and salt.
Brewery owner Ben Millstein said the seaweed was an easy fit.
“We used the amount of kelp that we thought would replace the amount of salt. It’s working really good,” he said.
The new beer was nearing its final stage as Millstein filled glasses with a small amount for tasting. He explained that there are over 150 different styles of beer and it is important to “calibrate one’s palate” before forming an opinion.
“Shift your mind into neutral and take a couple sips,” he instructed. “Then sit with it for 30 seconds or a minute and try not to judge. Let it in and let it go. Try to disengage and give it a calibration rest and then see what you think after that.”
The kelp beer had a pleasing briny taste and it won the governor’s approval.
“I like it. It’s very good,” Walker said, adding that he plans to add it to his kelp repertoire.
“I’ve got a kelp salsa story about how I helped get that Juneau product into Safeway, and now we have kelp beer to go with the salsa,” Walker said. “We are making it happen in Alaska as far as the blue economy. It’s right here in front of us.”
The Kelp Sea Level beer was set to be added to Kodiak Island Brewery’s 13-tap lineup any day.
“I think it’s going to be a huge hit,” said Johnsrud. “You can just smell the salt air and the seagulls. It’s similar to holding your ear up to a shell.”
More gov goings-on
While he was in Kodiak, Walker also signed House Bill 56 sponsored by Ketchikan Rep. Dan Ortiz that expands the state Revolving Loan Fund to create new financing options for fishing and mariculture businesses.
He also re-established the Alaska Mariculture Task Force as an advisory body with a goal of growing a $100-million mariculture industry in 20 years.
“The fiscal crisis is on the wane. It should never have happened in the first place and we should never be in that position again. Now we can get back to building Alaska,” Walker said in an interview.
In terms of Alaska’s seafood industry, he said the biggest challenges stem from “unpredictability.”
“We have seasonal highs and lows, problems with returns. It is very difficult for businesses to plan. One of our jobs is to make sure we provide the best data going forward as quickly as possible, so people and communities whose livelihoods depend on fishing have the assurance of a more stable future,” Walker said.
The governor said our seas are “under assault” from a warming climate and off kilter ocean chemistry. That was the impetus, he said, for forming a climate change action committee that is scheduled to introduce recommendations next month that will build upon past policy initiatives and encourage new ideas.
During a town meeting, several Kodiakans commented that Alaska lawmakers by and large “skim over” the economic, social and cultural importance of the seafood industry.
“It’s all about attitude,” Walker said. “Commercial fishing was Alaska’s first industry and it drove the push to statehood. We will make sure our fish benefit Alaska and coastal communities. We will show up and be engaged.”
Halibut shifts
Some big shifts were quietly made last week to the panel that oversees the Pacific halibut stocks, including the addition of a first-ever sportfish seat.
Both the U.S. and Canada named “relative newcomers” as commissioners to seats on the International Pacific Halibut Commission “during extremely sensitive negotiations on policy issues,” said Peggy Parker, director of the Halibut Association of North America and editor at Seafoodnews.com.
The changes to the panel of three Canadian and three U.S. seats came after a rare impasse in determining halibut catch limits for the 2018 season. In the end, all six agreed to lower limits for both countries, but not as a commission.
It was the second time in the IPHC’s 94-year history that an impasse could not be overcome, Parker said.
The commissioners also agreed to negotiate a resolution to their disagreements, which center on halibut distribution and bycatch accountability, before the annual meeting in January.
For the U.S. seats, NOAA Fisheries announced the reappointment of Bob Alverson, director of the Fishing Vessel Owners Association. Also, sport charter operator Richard Yamada, president of the Alaska Charter Association, replaced Linda Behnken, director of Sitka-based Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association and a halibut commissioner for two years.
Yamada is owner of Shelter Lodge near Juneau and has been involved in the charter fishing industry for nearly 40 years. He currently serves on state and federal fisheries advisory committees. Both men were appointed for five months, from Sept. 1 to Jan. 31, 2019.
Jim Balsiger, NOAA Fisheries Alaska manager who has represented the U.S. for nearly two decades, was reappointed through September, “but may be replaced after that, according to several people familiar with the process,” Parker said.
Both Chris Oliver, current head of NOAA Fisheries, and Doug Mecum, deputy regional manager at the fisheries service Juneau office, have been mentioned as possible replacements.
Eat more fish leaves babies behind
Seafood nutrition experts are gathering in the nation’s capital next week for a State of the Science Symposium. The non-profit Seafood Nutrition Partnership hosts the annual event as part of a public health campaign begun in 2015 aimed at getting Americans to eat more seafood.
The connection of omega rich seafood to brain health is a trending topic, according to the agenda .
“The brain and the retina in the eye are omega-3 organs. As calcium is to the bones, omega 3 is to the brain,” said Dr. Tom Brenna, professor of pediatrics and nutrition at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas/Austin and chair of the SNP advisory council.
Added to the symposium mix this year, Brenna said, are fisheries managers, aquaculture experts and environmental groups.
“And we guys on the medical nutrition side are thrilled,” Brenna said in a phone interview. “There is so much misinformation out there about the state of fisheries and management.
Having folks who can speak authoritatively about what folks are doing in U.S. fisheries and around the world is extraordinarily valuable and something we don’t get in any other forums.”
The partnership works with local dieticians and uses educational programs and social media to get its health messages across. Brenna said it has yet to come up with a catchy national brand.
“We don’t have a good a way of getting across the notion that seafood is such a delicious part of meals. Maybe we should have a contest to find a nice tag line that would identify seafood in the same way as ‘Got Milk?’ or ‘Beef, it’s what’s for dinner,’” he said.
A focus of the Seafood Nutrition Partnership is moms, but Brenna admitted that fish is missing from America’s baby food offerings.
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what the problem is,” he said. “It seems like it’s a consumer demand question; companies sell what the consumers demand and apparently, we have not done a good job in educating consumers about what they ought to be demanding for their kids.
“In nutrition circles, for 30 years we have been discussing that when we transition a baby or toddler from breast milk or formula that contains omega-3s, they are transitioning to foods that have hardly any omega-3s at all. And no fish,” Brenna added.
“We should be weaning kids to the foods that are going to be important throughout their lives. And this may be a reason why they are not consuming seafood when they get older. Maybe this is something that we can work on with baby food manufacturers.”
The seafood nutrition science symposium is set for Sept. 14 in Washington, DC. Audio and video will be available after the event.
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Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Cell phones are being used by fishermen to bounty hunt for pay for lost fishing gear.
California fishermen created the retrieval project last year along with the Nature Conservancy to get ropes, buoys, pots and anchors out of the water after the Dungeness fishery so they don’t entangle whales, and Washington and Oregon quickly followed suit. Nearly 50 whales were taken on the west coast last year after the annual crab opener, one of the region’s largest and most lucrative fisheries.
“They are using their cell phones and its GPS to take a picture of what the gear looked like, tell when they found it, and any identifying markings on the buoy — the vessel, the ID number, and also the latitude and longitude of exactly where they found it,” explained Nat Nichols, area manager for groundfish and shellfish at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game office in Kodiak.
He added that it is not uncommon for gear loss rates in different fisheries to be “anywhere from 3 to 23 percent.”
Under a special permit, the West Coast bounty hunters head out two weeks after the Dungeness crab fishery closes to search for derelict gear.
“Dungies tend to be in shallower water and that means there is more wave energy and the gear can get lost or rolled up on the beach. A lot of it has a tendency to move around because it’s in the tidal surge,” Nichols said.
The fishermen get paid $65 for every pot they pull up. The gear then goes back to the original owners who pay $100 per pot for its return.
Whereas saving whales was the prime motivator for pot retrievals on the West Coast, in Alaska’s crab and pot cod fisheries, it’s ghost fishing and gear conflicts.
“The animals go in the pots and starve and that rebaits the pot, so they will fish for years. That can kill a lot of animals because they’re doing it 24/7 and always rebaiting themselves,” Nichols explained.
By Alaska law, all pots must use twine in escape panels that biodegrades in about 30 days. But sometimes the escape routes get blocked.
“At Kodiak, we average around 7,000 pots in the water for our small Dungeness fishery,” he said. “If you lose 10 percent or even 5 percent, that’s a lot. It starts to build up over the years and get in everyone’s way. It’s a burden on everyone out on the water if they constantly have to avoid all this gear that is out there doing nothing.”
Gear recovery permits are issued to help with retrievals shortly after a crab or pot cod fishery closes; a state enforcement vessel also does a roundup of all the gear it finds. Nichols said the main focus is preventing the loss of pot gear in the first place
He believes a cell phone bounty program could work in Alaska and “it’s been talked about” at the Kodiak office, although it would be on a much smaller scale.
“Even though we have quite a bit of gear in the water, I’m not sure it’s enough to really incentive people to go find it in compared to the West Coast,” Nichols said. “Instead of retrieving hundreds of pots and having 20 to 30 people participating in the recovery, we may just have three or so.”
The cell phone idea hasn’t attracted any takers yet at Southeast Alaska, said Douglas-based shellfish biologist Adam Messmer in an email from a survey boat. Southeast is home to the state’s largest Dungeness fishery, where about 45,000 pots are dropped each year.
Pink salmon disaster plan unveiled
Two years ago, the state’s largest pink salmon regions at Prince William Sound, Kodiak and Southeast and lesser areas went bust from the worst pink returns in decades. At Gov. Bill Walker’s request the fishery was declared a disaster and Congress appropriated $56.3 million for Alaska fishermen, processors and communities.
Alaska and NOAA have developed a draft distribution plan for the funds, according to Seafoodnews.com. Once approved, the money will be administered by the Pacific States Marine Commission.
There are four categories outlined in the draft spending plan: research, municipalities, fishery participants and processors. The suggested distribution is $4.18 million for research; for municipalities, $2.43 million is set aside for the coastal communities that would have received 1.5 percent of the landed value of the foregone catch. Processors would get $17.7 million for lost wages as a result of the disaster.
Alaska fishermen would get the biggest portion at $32 million. It would be distributed using a calculation that will restore lost ex-vessel (dockside) value equal to 82.5 percent of their five even-year averages.
Talk fish
Kodiak’s famous fisheries debate featuring Alaska candidates for governor is set for Oct. 22. Since 1991 all leading candidates have participated in the event, which focuses on the seafood industry and is broadcast statewide.
Gov. Bill Walker and Democrat candidate Mark Begich have confirmed they will be in Kodiak to “talk fish”; no response yet from Republican candidate Mike Dunleavy, said Frank Shiro, director of the Kodiak Chamber of Commerce, which hosts the fish debate.
Hatchery facts
Hatcheries in the southern portion of Southeast Alaska provide stability for the region’s fishermen and processors, and a big chunk of fish for sports anglers.
A new economic impact report by the McDowell Group profiled the Southern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association, a 42 year old nonprofit that operates seven hatcheries and seven release sites from Dixon Entrance to Frederick Sound.
The combined operations produce and release around 170 million salmon smolts to the sea annually. Over the last 10 years, the hatchlings have contributed 19 percent of the volume and 28 percent of the value of the region’s total harvests.
As a portion of the overall catches averaged over five years from 2008 through 2017, salmon that began their lives in local hatcheries accounted for 57 percent of chum catches, 39 percent for chinook and 31 percent of the coho harvests, valued at $175 million to the local fisheries.
Fishermen averaged $84 million over the five years from hatchery catches, with most of the benefit going to salmon fishermen in the Petersburg-Wrangell area at 37 percent, followed by Ketchikan at 29 percent and Prince of Wales residents claiming 25 percent of the salmon’s dockside value.
By gear type, 46 percent of the hatchery salmon harvest value is dominated by the seine fleet, 32 percent are gillnetters and 21 percent are trollers.
The report said that a key benefit of salmon returning home to local hatcheries is that it provides stability with the chums balancing out the volatility of other species, notably, those tough to predict pinks.
Other findings: local processors earned an estimated gross margin of $134 million on hatchery salmon over the five years; chum roe accounted for nearly half.
The role of the fish in the sportfishing sector is especially prominent near Ketchikan. Creel surveys showed that roughly a third of the chinook salmon caught were from local hatcheries along with 13 percent of the sport cohos.
The state closely monitors straying of hatchery fish into wild systems in all areas where the fish are released. An 11-year study at Southeast Alaska and Prince William Sound is currently underway focused on interactions of hatchery and wild salmon to provide guidance for assessing Alaska’s hatchery program.
Pollock possibilities
Researchers at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science have discovered that gelatin from pollock skins makes a sealant that is 12 times stronger than conventional uses.
A big plus is that the fish gelatin remains liquid at room temperature and can be sprayed directly onto an open wound on any body organ.
Pollock skins also are an exciting new source for nanofibers that are similar to tissue in human organs and skin.
“Hopefully, if you have a damaged organ you can grow these cells outside the body and then reintroduce it into the wound to help improve the ability of an organs to heal itself,” said Bor-Sen Chiou at the U.S. Department of Agriculture lab in California. He added during a radio interview that studies show fish gelatins improve cell growth far better than traditional animal gels.
Along with pharmaceuticals, gelatin from pollock skins also has huge potential in the food industry.
“They have substances that can be used as a beverage thickener, a clarifier for juices, plus you can roll it out into great films,” said former USDA food technologist Cindy Bower.
“When you test it against bovine and pig skin films there is decreased water vapor permeability, meaning the fish films are a better barrier to water. So there is application for using them to coat foods, to keep moisture in or out,” Bower added. “Plus, they’re fish so they satisfy kosher and Halal (Muslim) dietary restrictions. That opens markets for millions of people worldwide.”
From skin to bones, ground up pollock bones are being roto tilled into the soil in California neighborhoods to neutralize toxic lead, a problem in nearly every U.S. urban area. Instead of digging up and disposing of contaminated soil, the calcium phosphate in tons of Alaska pollock bone meal is turning the lead into a harmless mineral.
The alchemy has been known for nearly 20 years and used mostly at mining sites and military bases.
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Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

More seafood tariffs in Trump’s trade war with China are hitting Alaska coming and going.
On July 6, the first 25 percent tax went into effect on more than 170 U.S. seafood products going to China. On Aug. 23 more items were added to the list, including fishmeal from Alaska.
“As of right now, nearly every species and product from Alaska is on that list of tariffs,” said Garrett Evridge, a fisheries economist with the McDowell Group.
Alaska produces more than 70,000 metric tons of fishmeal per year (about 155 million pounds), mostly from pollock trimmings, with salmon a distant second. The pollock meal is used primarily in Chinese aquaculture production, while salmon meal goes mostly to pet food makers in the U.S.
In 2017 about $70 million worth of fishmeal from Alaska pollock was exported to China from processing plants all over the state.
Anchovy-based fishmeal from Peru is the predominate source for world aquaculture, but whitefish meal made from Alaska pollock is regarded as the premium. According to Undercurrent News, pollock meal commands $600 to $700 more per ton than Peruvian meal and is currently trading at up to $2,300 per ton.
The tariffs on U.S. seafood products exported to China is a done deal. In the long run, Evridge said Alaska might be able to shift exports to other countries, but the size of the Chinese market makes it tough to replace.
“On the Chinese side, it looks like there is little recourse,” Evridge said. “At least in the short term there is little ability for the Alaska seafood industry to avert these tariffs.”
And there’s also a flip side.
Trump has proposed a 25 percent tariff on products coming into the U.S. from China. It would include seafood that is caught in Alaska, shipped to China for reprocessing into fillets, portions or fish sticks and then resent to the U.S. for distribution to buyers.
“That will possibly be the case next month when those tariffs go into effect on the U.S. side,” Evridge said.
On Aug. 20, the U.S. International Trade Commission began hearing from over 350 speakers representing a wide variety of industries harmed by Trump’s tariffs from flooring to fruit juices to fish. The commission also must review more than 2,300 letters received so far; the pile is expected to grow by the Sept. 6 public comment deadline.
“We’re kind of a pawn in a broader game,” Evridge said, adding that the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, Alaska’s congressional delegation and the governor’s office are “closely engaged.”
The National Fisheries Institute voiced strong opposition to the proposed new tariffs in testimony last week saying that “it will punish American fishermen and the communities that rely on them by making their products more expensive for American families to eat.”
“Of the $2.7 billion in annual seafood shipments subject to this proposal, an estimated $950 million comes from an American fisherman – primarily an Alaska fisherman – harvesting in U.S. waters in a U.S.-flag vessel using a U.S. crew,” said NFI’s Robert DeHaan.
One of the Trump Administration’s stated goals — making China respect its obligations regarding intellectual property rights — don’t line up with tariffs on seafood, DeHaan added.
“How punishing these harvesters — and these businesses for ‘Buying American’ — will convince China to respect its obligations regarding intellectual property rights and technology transfers is difficult to fathom,” he said. “Cutting fish is not an intellectual property secret.”
Last year China purchased 54 percent of Alaska’s seafood, valued at nearly $800 million.
Salmon wrap
Alaska’s statewide salmon catch is 31 percent below expectations and is unlikely to reach the preseason forecast of 147 million fish.
In what the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is calling an “unusual season” in a wrap up announcement, they said that the shortfall stems from poor pink salmon returns to Gulf of Alaska regions.
ADFG also cited unexpected run timing for sockeyes at several major regions, causing uncertainty for managers and lost harvest opportunities for fishermen. Bristol Bay’s Kvichak River saw the latest peak since 1956; more than half of the Kenai River’s late-run sockeye returned during the month of August, which has only occurred once before; and Copper River sockeye salmon returned in three distinct pulses, the third happening in mid-July.
But “it is important to maintain perspective on historical salmon harvests,” ADFG said, pointing out that the three largest Alaska salmon harvests on record occurred between 2013 and 2017.
The 2018 season has not been without bright spots, notably at Bristol Bay, which experienced the second largest sockeye salmon harvest on record of nearly 42 million fish, and the fourth consecutive season with the harvest topping 35 million sockeyes.
Norton Sound also is likely to exceed last year’s record coho salmon harvest and at Kotzebue, the chum salmon harvest will be among the top four on record.
Preliminary statewide total harvests and exvessel (dockside)values by salmon species and area will be available by mid-October.
Salmon cells
Plans are underway to grow and sell salmon and other seafoods made directly from fish cells. San Diego-based BlueNalu says it will “disrupt current industry practices” and be a pioneer in “cellular aquaculture,” in which living cells are isolated from fish tissue, cultured in various lab media and then assembled into “great-tasting fresh and frozen seafood products.”
BlueNalu is being seeded with $4.5 million in startup money from a private venture fund called New Crop Capital whose mission is ‘funding the future of food.’
Seafood perceptions
Seafood lovers around the world believe that the biggest threat to the oceans is pollution, followed by overfishing. Those are some of the top takeaways from a survey earlier this year of more than 25,000 people in 22 countries.
The survey was done by the public opinion research firm GlobeScan for the Marine Stewardship Council. The non-profit MSC led the movement starting 20 years ago towards certifying fisheries that are managed sustainably, which has become a requirement of doing business by most seafood buyers around the globe.
The study found that 72 percent of seafood consumers want sustainability verifications at their supermarkets, but price is still the biggest motivator for buying decisions. A surprising gender divide showed that men are more motivated by price while women regarded seafood sustainability as more important.
Seventy-two percent also agreed that buying seafood from sustainable sources will help save our oceans; 70 percent said people should switch their purchases to earth friendly fisheries.
Eighty-three percent of global consumers agreed that seafood needs to be protected for future generations, and 70 percent said they would like to hear more from companies about their sustainability purchasing practices.
In what the survey called “a climate of persistently low consumer trust in business globally,” trust in the blue MSC label remained high at 69 percent and understanding of the label has increased to 37 percent, up from 32 percent in 2016.
Younger consumers are even more tuned in to choosing sustainable seafood, with 41 percent of 18-34 year olds understanding what the MSC label means. That group also showed a slightly different profile, eating less seafood on average and worrying more about the effects of climate change on the oceans than their older counterparts.
Global consumers also rated certification organizations third for their contribution to protecting the oceans, after NGOs and scientists. Governments and large companies rated as contributing the least.
Fish event
Big names in fisheries are inviting the public to participate at a special town hall event on August 31 at the Centennial Hall Convention Center in Juneau. Keynote is retired Navy Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, an American oceanographer who currently serves as the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere within the U.S. Department of Commerce. Gallaudet will discuss the DOC’s Strategic Plan and NOAA’s Blue Economy priorities.
Joining him in a roundtable discussion is David Wetherell, director of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council; Nicole Kimball, vice president of operations for the Pacific Seafood Processors Association; Alexa Tonkovich, director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute; Frances Leach, director of United Fishermen of Alaska; Rich Yamada, president of the Alaska Charter Association; Stephanie Madsen, director of the At-sea Processors Association; Chad See, director of the Freezer Longline Coalition; Ben Stevens, tribal advocate for the Tanana Chiefs Conference; Mark Fina, policy analyst for U.S. Seafoods; Jamie Goen, director of Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers; Paddy O’Donnell, president of Alaska Whitefish Trawlers; Brett Veerhusen, alternate director of the North Pacific Fisheries Association, Chris Woodley, director of the Groundfish Forum and Linda Behnken, director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.
The group will take questions from the public. Doors open at 3:30. Contact is Kevin Wheeler at [email protected] or 202-482-5096.
Video deadline
Aug. 31 also is the deadline to submit videos to the worldwide Women in Seafood competition. Videos must be no longer than four minutes and will be judged in two categories: Under 25 which highlights futures for young women in the seafood industry, and Women’s Contributions from a social and/or economic perspective. Winners will receive 1,000 Euros (US $1,162) and their films will be shown to global audiences. Send videos to [email protected] or [email protected] Winners will be announced in late September.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

As Gov. Bill Walker prepares to sign a bill this week enacting the Alaska Mariculture Development Plan, 16 new applicants hope to soon begin growing shellfish and seaweed businesses in just more than 417 acres of tideland areas in Alaska.
The new growers will add to the 35 farms and six hatchery/nurseries that already are producing a mix of oysters, clams, mussels and various seaweeds. Eventually, sea cucumbers, scallops, giant geoduck clams and algae for biofuels will be added into the mix.
Most of the mariculture requests in Alaska are located in Southeast and Southcentral regions and range in size from 0.02 acres at Halibut Cove to 292 acres for two sites at Craig.
Data from the state Department of Natural Resources show that two farms have applied at Kodiak totaling nearly 37 acres, and one Sitka applicant has plans for a 15-acre plot. Other communities getting into the mariculture act include Seldovia, Port Chatham, Juneau, Naukati, Cordova, Ketchikan and Gustavus.
In 2017, Alaskan farms produced 11,456 pounds of clams, 1,678 pounds of mussels, 16,570 pounds of seaweeds and 1.8 million oysters.
Oysters always have been the dominant mariculture crop, and several farmers have added kelp to their acreage. The seaweed takes just three months to grow to harvestable size and can provide a ready cash flow to farmers while they wait for up to three years for their bivalves to ripen.
Kelp is poised to be one of Alaska’s biggest crops with one of the biggest payouts.
The first Alaska crop of 15,000 pounds was harvested last year at Kodiak, which yielded a payday of about $10,000 for grower Nick Mangini. This year he tripled his take with 42,000 pounds of two products: brown kelp (alaria) and sugar kelp.
Mangini said 75 percent of the crop was alaria, for which he received 90 cents per pound, and 45 cents per pound for the sugar kelp, adding up to more than $33,000.
The kelp is marketed under the name Kodiak Island Sustainable Seaweed, or KISS, and sold to a California company called Blue Evolution.
“We are making it into products that are familiar to North American consumers, so our first items were pastas and macaroni and cheese,” said founder Beau Perry. “It actually deepens the flavor profile. Everyone from moms and dads who are feeding it to their kids to gourmet chefs are responding very positively.”
It’s all a drop in the bucket compared to the real potential for the new industry in Alaska.
“If only three-tenths of a percent of Alaska’s 35,000 miles of coastline was developed for oysters, for example, it could produce 1.3 billion oysters at 50 cents (each) adding up to $650 million a year,” said Julie Decker, director of the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation and head of an 11-member mariculture task force established in 2016 by Walker through administrative order.
The task force concluded that mariculture crops could yield $1 billion for the state within 30 years.
The governor plans to sign the bill at grower Trevor Sande’s farm near Ketchikan.
Treadwell talks fish
Politics aside, one thing that can be said about Republican candidate for governor Mead Treadwell is that he knows fish.
“One thing I know is that fishing is Alaska’s largest employer and you can’t have good fishing unless you have good science and transparent management,” he said in a phone interview.
Treadwell touts research as the cornerstone for fisheries sustainability.
“I believe we could double or triple the endowed science available for North Pacific, Bering Sea and Arctic marine research and I think it’s very important to do,” he said.
Treadwell was a past chairman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, involved with the North Pacific Research Board and one of the earliest advocates for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute and Alaska’s Community Development Quota program.
As a student of international fisheries policy law, Treadwell said his first job was as a “foot soldier” working with then Department of Interior Secretary Wally Hickel in the fight for the 200-mile limit that removed foreign fishing fleets from U.S. waters.
Treadwell pointed to other protein industries and said he believes Alaska’s seafood industry could add jobs and revenues by using more of every fish.
“Other industries sell everything but the squeal,” he said. “I think we have to do much more with all of the fish and add the value here so we are not exporting jobs. Let’s look at our incentives for keeping more processing plants open year round — it might be a fix in power costs or something to do with tax policy.”
Treadwell said he is a big supporter of growing the state’s mariculture industry, including biofuels.
“As governor you control the tidelands. We can back that up with a process that helps financing and helps grow a new industry. I’m excited about that,” he said.
“And this opportunity with energy is also significant. I’ve visited some of the labs that are working on algal energy and we have to look at these kinds of opportunities to diversify our economy.”
As governor, Treadwell said he also would fight to get more chinook salmon for Southeast Alaskans who have lost over 60 percent of their catch quotas in the treaty with Canada.
“We have lost too much of that allocation and it’s just not fair,” he said.
Numerous attempts to interview Mead Treadwell’s Republican opponent, Mike Dunleavy, were unsuccessful.
Fish smell
Fish scientists proved years ago that the tiniest traces of copper in water can affect a salmon’s sense of smell. Now, new research shows that increasing levels of acidity in the oceans does the same thing. The damage is caused by the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide, which is generated primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, like oil and coal. The CO2 combines with seawater to produce carbonic acid, which makes the water more acidic.
Fish use their sense of smell to find food, elude predators, locate spawning areas, even to recognize one another. Losing it could mean big trouble for the fishing industry, tourism and global nutrition.
“In the marine environment it has some serious implications. If there are predators around and the fish are not able to respond to these danger signals in the water, they would be the next snack for these larger predators,” said Jason Sandahl at Oregon State University, who was one of the first to show how contaminants can disrupt the chemical balance of sea creatures.
His studies showed that copper levels at just two parts per billion impaired small salmon’s sense of smell.
Last month, scientists at England’s University of Exeter compared the behavior of juvenile sea bass at carbon dioxide levels typical of today’s ocean conditions with those predicted for the end of the century.
The results showed that the sense of smell in the fish was reduced by half. They also found that sea bass exposed to the more acidic conditions swam less and were less likely to react when encountering the smell of a predator. The longer the fish were in high CO2 levels, the worse they fared.
The scientists concluded that future levels of carbon dioxide can affect fish population numbers and entire ecosystems. While their study was on sea bass, the researchers said they believe all species important to commercial and sport fisheries are likely to be affected in a similar way, and possibly crabs and lobsters as well.
Pollock is tops
Alaska pollock is the largest fish catch in the world for four years running, toppling anchovies from Chile and Peru.
More than 40 million commercial fishermen were out at work on global waters on nearly five million boats, of which 90 percent are less than 40 feet long.
Those numbers have held steady over several years, said the latest State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report compiled every other year by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
It is the only publication of its kind that oversees fisheries track records and trends around the globe.
Highlights from 2016 show that the world’s total marine catch was nearly 80 million tons, a slight decrease due to that drop in anchovies.
Aquaculture represented 53 percent of all seafood eaten and it is the fastest growing food production sector on the planet. Nearly 600 different species items are farmed around the world; No. 1 is carp.
Growing aquatic plants, especially seaweeds, has more than doubled in 20 years to top 30 million tons.
In per capita terms, global fish consumption has grown about 1.5 percent per year from less than 20 pounds in 1961 to 45 pounds.
Americans eat far less fish, averaging about 15 pounds a year.
So how are the world’s fish stocks doing?
Sixty percent were called “maximally sustained” and 33 percent were classified as being fished at unsustainable levels.
Problem regions were the Mediterranean, Southeast Pacific and the Southwest Atlantic, with 60 percent of their stocks called overfished.
By contrast, the Northeast, Northwest Pacific and Central and Southwest Pacific had the lowest levels of overfishing ranging from 13 percent to 17 percent.
The World Fisheries Report said that impacts from climate change are likely to push down global ocean production by six percent by the year 2100, and 11 percent in tropical zones.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Tiny cod fish are reappearing around Kodiak.
Researchers aim to find out if it is a blip, or a sign that the stock is recovering after warming waters caused the stocks to crash.
Alaska’s seafood industry was shocked last fall when the annual surveys showed cod stocks in the Gulf of Alaska had plummeted by 80 percent to the lowest levels ever seen. Prior surveys indicated large year classes of cod starting in 2012 were expected to produce good fishing for six or more years. But a so-called “blob” of warm water depleted food supplies and wiped out that recruitment.
“That warm water was sitting in the Gulf for three years starting in 2014 and it was different than other years in that it went really deep and it also lasted throughout the winter. You can deplete the food source pretty rapidly when the entire ecosystem is ramped up in those warm temperatures,” explained Steven Barbeaux with the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, or AFSC, in Seattle.
This summer, researchers at Kodiak saw the first signs of potential recovery with beach seine catches of tiny first year cod that are born offshore and drift as larvae into coastal grassy areas in July and August.
“A lot can happen in that first year of life that we would like to learn more about to predict whether or not these year classes are actually going to survive,” said Ben Laurel, a fisheries research biologist with the AFSC based in Newport, Ore., whose specialty is early survival of cold water commercial fish species.
Laurel’s team, which includes scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has been studying the early life history of Pacific cod in waters around Kodiak every year since 2005. They documented changes in what he calls “young of the year” fish throughout the warm water event through 2016. Right afterwards, they saw no first-year cod but Laurel said things might be taking a turn for the better.
“In 2017 the ocean temperatures started to get back to normal and we did see signs of some fish, which is good because we hadn’t seen fish earlier,” he said. “In 2018 we also are seeing some young fish. But again, we’re just looking at one year in one area and it might not be reflective throughout the Gulf, so we are not sure what it means.”
Laurel is taking the tiny cod back to the Oregon wet lab where they will run tests on survival conditions.
“Do they have the likelihood of making it to adulthood just like those fish before the warm water blob? We just don’t know,” he explained. “We don’t have much data on cod during the winter and we can fill that gap in the lab. We can run them through a simulated over winter experience at different temperatures and see what the consequences are of them being a certain size or having certain food available, or what sort of conditions do they need to survive a whole overwintering experience.”
The cod study this summer also is expanding to more nearshore areas of Kodiak, along the Alaska Peninsula and the eastern Gulf. Laurel credited the AFSC with “really responsive reactions to this drastic reduction in the population,” and adding “more eyes and effort” to understand what happened to the cod stocks.
The research, he said, will provide a window into what might be expected with a changing climate.
“It is kind of a dress rehearsal for what is to come,” he said. “We can’t expect things to stay as they are, and we need to understand these processes and be proactive. I’m encouraged but also nervous about what’s in line for the future. Everybody should be braced for uncertainty.”
Net hack challenge
An Alaska Net Hack Challenge is being planned for Sept. 8 and 9 in Kodiak and Anchorage. The goal is to identify potential opportunities for using the tons of old plastic fishing nets piled up in landfills and storage lots across the state, and develop new items from the materials. The nets can weigh from 5,000 to 20,000 pounds each.
The challenge is based on the Circular Ocean program in the U.K. and Iceland that “aims to inspire enterprises and entrepreneurs to realize the hidden opportunities in discarded fishing nets.” The Alaska hack is sponsored by Grundens, Alpar and Saltwater Inc.
“The goal is to change how people look at nets and ropes, not as a waste material but as a raw material that can be used in many ways,” said Nicole Baker, founder of www.netyourproblem.com and organizer of the event along with the Alaska Ocean Cluster Initiative.
“Socks, water bottles, cell phone cases, carpets, bathing suits, sneakers, sunglasses, skateboards, rugs, bowls, frisbees, even 3-D printing and injection molds. People are becoming so creative about finding ways to reuse these plastic products,” Baker said.
The Alaska challenge is aimed at artists, students, designers, business owners, engineers, recyclers and anyone interested in designing new products out of the materials.
“On the first day of the challenge we will show presentations about the context and scale of the issue, the type of materials available, and some businesses that have been implemented already,” she explained. “On the second day, teams will get together and use the material and design a prototype, either physically or on a computer, that will be presented to judges to get their feedback.”
A video link will connect the two locations and judges will score the projects on creativity, usefulness and scalability and follow the development over six months.
“That will be supported by the Alaska Ocean Cluster Initiative which has several programs to assist with making small businesses and startups commercially viable,” Baker said.
“If Alaska gets on board, it could be another revenue stream,” added Brian Himelbloom, a retired University of Alaska seafood specialist who is organizing the Kodiak net hack challenge with an assist by the Alaska Marine Conservation Council.
“There are a lot of creative people in Kodiak,” he added, pointing to the Alaska Rug Company that uses fishing nets and ropes to make handwoven doormats, pot holders, baskets, bowls, signs, and more at their remote home at the decommissioned Port Bailey Cannery. The company was recently featured in HGTV magazine.
Himelbloom said the groups also will reach out to local schools to attract “youngsters who are thinking about going into business.” They also are creating a net hack tool kit for remote communities interested in having their own challenges.
The events will take place at the Makerspace Building in Anchorage and at the Kodiak Marine Science Center. Visit www.alaskaoceancluster.com to register to attend.
Meanwhile, Nicole Baker also will be in Kodiak in late August to coordinate a fishing net recycling program. It will mirror a first effort last year in Dutch Harbor that sent 40 nets weighing 240,000 pounds to a company called Plastix in Denmark where they were melted down, pelletized and resold to manufacturers of plastic products.
A second shipment also is being planned at Dutch Harbor and Baker said she also has been contacted by people in Juneau, Homer, Seward and other Alaska communities who want to develop net recycling programs.
The Alaska Net Hack Challenge and the recycling program have attracted the attention of Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
“It was my first letter from a senator’s office,” Baker said. “I was very excited.”
Fish watch
Alaska’s total salmon catch has topped 88 million fish: more than 48 million are sockeyes and nearly 42 million of the reds are from Bristol Bay. Fishing is winding down there but lots of salmon is still being hauled in elsewhere, albeit slowly in most regions.
The Dungeness fishery in Southeast is ongoing with a summer harvest pegged at 2.25 million pounds.
Golden king crab opened along the Aleutians on Aug. 1 with a 6.3 million-pound harvest, an increase of nearly 1 million pounds for the first time in 20 years.
Halibut fishermen have taken 56 percent of their nearly 20 million-pound catch limit. For sablefish, 47 percent of the nearly 26 million-pound quota has been taken. Both fisheries close Nov. 7.
Fishing for cod, rockfish, flounders, pollock and other whitefish continues in the Bering Sea; likewise, in the Gulf where pollock fishing will reopen on Aug. 25.
The Alaska Board of Fisheries has set an Aug. 15 deadline to receive agenda change requests for its upcoming meeting cycle.
The board will take up fisheries at Bristol Bay, the Alaska Peninsula, the Arctic Yukon Kuskokwim, Aleutian Islands and Chignik from November through March. A special two-day meeting on Pacific cod takes place in early October.
Finally, more genetically modified Atlantic salmon grown in Panama has made its way to undisclosed markets. Last summer, Massachusetts-based biotech firm AquaBounty sold its first five tons of “Frankenfish” to undisclosed Canadian customers. The manmade fish grows three times faster than normal salmon.
AquaBounty received FDA approval this year to raise its AquAdvantage salmon at its new land-based Indiana facility, but is currently prevented from importing its genetically tweaked salmon eggs from Canada due to an “Import Alert” pending the issuance of final labeling guidelines.
“We anticipate the import alert to be lifted in the second half of this year,” CEO Ronald Stotish said in a press release.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Alaskans celebrated Alaska Wild Salmon Day on Aug. 10, but plans also are underway for a much bigger celebration: the International Year of the Salmon set to officially begin in 2019.
The theme is “Salmon and people in a changing world” and a key focus will be a winter salmon study in the deepest regions of the Gulf of Alaska.
Both are sponsored in part by the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, which for 25 years has promoted research collaboration among scientists in its five member countries of Canada, Russia, Japan, Korea and the U.S.
“The main inspiration for development of this project is our awareness of the challenges salmon meet in the open ocean related to the climate and in the coastal areas,” said Dr. Vladimir Radchenko, commission director and one of the world’s leading salmon scientists.
A primary goal of Year of the Salmon is to get more people involved in protecting salmon and “coastal societies.” The aim of the Gulf project, Radchenko said, is to better understand the ocean phase of the salmon life cycle. Doing so would improve knowledge to help forecast salmon abundance and carrying capacity of the North Pacific.
Researchers have some fragmented understanding of salmon distribution in the deep Gulf area from several surveys starting in the late 1980s. But the surveys were small and the results contradictory, Radchenko said. The project set for next winter will be done with trawl gear and cover a vast area in international waters 200 miles from shore.
“During the winter, all salmon species migrate off shore and we have compared patterns of distribution seen in previous surveys and found that the main spots of salmon aggregation should be located beyond the Exclusive Economic Zone in February and March,” Radchenko explained.
He added: “It will be a deep survey at about 72 trawl stations and include oceanographic testing of temperature and concentrations of all physical and chemical elements as well as plankton cages so we will have information on the whole ecosystem. We also will take scale samples to determine the salmon origins.”
Based on the survey results Radchenko said researchers “may conclude the current state of the salmon stocks which spend the winter in the Gulf of Alaska.”
He said scientists in all countries believe that major salmon stocks are facing challenges from the impacts of climate change, especially in southern areas of the North Pacific where warming water circulation patterns are wreaking havoc with salmon food sources.
“The warming could make some ocean waters unsuitable for salmon. It is one of the biggest climate changes problems evident now, maybe more important than ocean acidification,” he added.
The 2019 winter survey will include scientists from all member countries and is set to be the first of many, depending on funds.
Blue updates
Alaska lays claim to over half of the nation’s coastline, nearly two-thirds of its seafood catches and more ocean than any other region. But Alaska’s economic output accounts for only about four percent of the U.S. ocean economy.
The Alaska Ocean Cluster Initiative, or OCI, aims to create a more diversified and resilient “blue economy” by getting more value from our oceans.
“Globally the oceans are being viewed as the last economic frontier and there is a big push to develop them. Our hope is that Alaska becomes a leader in this blue economy and sustainable development of our ocean resources,” said Joel Cladouhos, director of the OCI, which began a year ago in partnership with the Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association.
The concept is modeled after a program used in Iceland since the 1970s that seeds an “economic ecosystem” of industry, academics, business and government to create a blue growth strategy.
Cladouhos believes it is a good fit for Alaska’s well-developed marine infrastructure and can build upon many programs and projects that already exist, such as the Alaska Maritime Workforce Initiative and statewide expansion of mariculture.
Blue startups can run the maritime gamut for businesses in or around the ocean, including coastal tourism, marine transportation and emerging sectors such as marine biotechnology and ocean technology.
A blue economy also could help provide year-round employment in Alaska’s 200 coastal communities. The OCI believes going blue can provide 50,000 jobs and a $3 billion dollar payroll by the year 2040, making it as significant as the oil industry is today.
“Oil has provided incredible economic impact in Alaska and we would not be where we are today without it,” Cladouhos said. “But we want the conversation to be around pipelines of innovation and entrepreneurship in the future. And that would drive economic benefit and job growth that is larger than the oil industry today.”
The biggest roadblock, the OCI believes, stems from Alaska’s business model. Since the U.S. purchased Alaska in 1867, the approach has been to extract natural resources and export the raw materials out of the state. That commodity-driven extraction model produces boom and bust cycles. The solution is to build a new, forward looking economy that creates value from our natural resources in a way that is socially, environmentally and economically sustainable.
The Ocean Cluster has launched several programs over the past year to enhance the Blue Economy mindset among Alaskans.
Ocean Tuesdays are one-hour weekly webinars on a wide range of topics. Two-day Blue Storm workshops are customized to local areas. A virtual Blue Pipeline Incubator advises ocean based startups and so far has attracted several companies ranging from smokehouses to net hangers to fish fertilizers to vessel inspections using drones. A six-week Google Ocean Technology team event attracted nearly Alaska 30 sponsors.
The OCI will use a $391,000 federal grant from the economic development administration to do outreach to more entrepreneurs.
“We want to expand in Alaska,” Cladouhos said. “Anyone can reach out to us and we can start to move forward with developing their ideas.”
Questions? Contact [email protected]/
More tariffs and eyes on endangered species
President Donald Trump announced on Aug. 1 that he is escalating his trade war with plans to increase the tariff on Chinese exports to the U.S. from 10 percent to 25 percent. (That is in addition to the 25 percent tariff on U.S. goods being sent to China that went into effect on July 6.)
The list of goods affected includes nearly every U.S. seafood product. In terms of a bailout similar to that being proposed for farmers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates an aid package for the commercial fishing and processing industry would cost more than $1 billion to offset the impact of trade taxes to their businesses.
Public comments can be made the U.S. Trade Office through Sept. 5.
Also on the federal docket: Trump and his team have turned their eyes to scaling back protections in the Endangered Species Act.
Last week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed changes to the way species are listed or removed from protections, and how critical habitat designations are made. New language also would allow officials for the first time to consider the economic consequences of listing a species.
The New York Times called it “the most sweeping set of changes in decades” to the regulations used to enforce the act.
Comments on proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act can be made through Sept. 24 at www.regulations.gov.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Alaska appears to be an exception in terms of gender parity at all levels of its seafood industry.
Women comprise roughly half of the world’s seafood industry workforce, yet a report released last week revealed that 61 percent of women around the globe feel they face unfair gender biases from slime lines to businesses to company boardrooms. The women’s overall responses cited biases in recruitment and hiring, in working conditions and inflexible scheduling.
The findings were based on 700 responses gathered in an online survey from September through December of last year. Thirty percent of the respondents were men; 27 percent of the total responses came from North America.
In my view, Alaska doesn’t fit the picture.
Based on “empirical evidence” spanning 30 years as a fisheries writer, I always have encountered women at all levels of seafood harvesting and processing, business, management, education and research, as agency heads and commissioners and in top directorships in industry trade groups and organizations.
While women may be outnumbered by men in the state’s seafood industry overall, they are highly visible and valued throughout the workforce hierarchy.
Maybe Alaska’s small population levels the playing field and smart, talented women are not so easily overlooked. But that’s clearly not the case elsewhere.
In the survey, 33 percent of women said they have faced discrimination at work; 49 percent said there are unequal opportunities for men and women; 12 percent of women cited sexual harassment.
One striking finding of the gender equality in the seafood industry report was that women and men have very different perceptions of the problem. Fewer than half of the men surveyed said that they believe women face biases throughout the industry.
“Less than one men in 10 consider women are facing discrimination. It is important to see that men and women do not share the same diagnosis. If it is not shared, things cannot change,” said Marie Catherine Montfort, report co-author and CEO of the international group Women in the Seafood Industry.
Many women said they are not given incentives to join the seafood industry, especially at school levels.
An interesting view shared by 80 percent of both genders was that the industry holds little appeal for women.
“This is probably the only shared response — that both believe the industry is not attractive to women. I think this question should be asked by seafood companies and all stakeholders in this industry,” Montfort said, adding “that likely explains the 83 percent (71 percent men) who said the seafood industry has a lack of female candidates for jobs.”
The WSI survey also revealed that the seafood industry puts more focus on racial diversity than gender equality.
Scandinavian countries got the highest marks for perceptions of gender equality at 58 percent; North America totaled 33 percent.
Recognizing and raising the awareness of biases against women is the first step towards making positive changes, Montfort said, and the report findings can “open routes to progress.”
“It can identify barriers to gender equality and identify good practices,” she said.
To help draw attention to the issue, WSI has launched a short video contest to showcase women working in all areas of the seafood industry. The winner will receive 1,000 Euros ($1,165 US) and get wide play at fishery events around the world. Deadline is Aug. 31.
Contact [email protected]
Prices high/catches low
Salmon prices are starting to trickle in as more sales are firmed up by local buyers, and early signs point to good paydays across the board.
At Bristol Bay last week, Trident, Ocean Beauty and Togiak Seafoods posted a base price of $1.25 per pound for sockeye, according to KDLG in Dillingham. Trident also was paying a 15-cent bonus for reds that are chilled and bled, and the others may follow suit.
Copper River Seafoods raised its sockeye price from $1.30 to $1.70 for fish that is chilled/bled and sorted. That company also reportedly is paying 80 cents per pound for coho salmon and 45 cents per pound for chums and pinks.
The average base price last year for Bristol Bay sockeye was $1.02 per pound, 65 cents for cohos, 30 cents for chums and 18 cents for pinks.
Kodiak advances were reported at $1.60 for sockeye, 55 cents for chums and 40 cents for pinks. That compares to average prices of $1.38 for sockeyes, 40 cents for chums and 31 cents for Kodiak pinks in 2017.
At Prince William Sound a sockeye base price was reported at $1.95 and chums at 95 cents.
At Norton Sound the single buyer was advancing 80 cents per pound for chums and $1.40 for cohos, same as last year, and 25 cents for pinks, an increase of 22 cents.
Salmon fishermen at Kotzebue were getting 40 cents for chums, down from 48 cents, but that price is expected to increase when a third buyer comes on line.
The weekly summary from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game said that Southeast trollers were averaging $8.48 per pound for chinook salmon, an increase of $1.15 over last year. Troll-caught cohos were at $1.64, a 16-cent increase and chums were paying out at 90 cents, up 13 cents from 2017.
All prices are likely to change when more sales are made in coming months.
Alaska’s total salmon catches are still down by one-third compared with the statewide harvest topping 70 million fish by July 27. Nearly 42 million of the salmon were sockeye from Bristol Bay.
Seafood slight
As President Donald Trump prepares to offer U.S. farmers $12 billion in aid to help compensate for losses caused by trade scuffles with China, Democrats in Congress have put forth a plan to help fishermen.
House Resolution 6528 was introduced July 25 by Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton. It aims to add language to the Magnuson Stevens Fisheries Act that disaster relief funds can also be used in the case of “unilateral tariffs imposed by other countries on any United States seafood.”
Co-sponsors of the bill include Reps. Chellie Pingree of Maine, Stephen Lynch and William Keating of Massachusetts, Jared Huffman of California and Raul Grijalva of Arizona.
Fishermen “don’t deserve to be victims of this self-imposed trade war,” Pingree said at a hearing last week.
Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska also are being outspoken in their support of fishermen.
But the snub to U.S. farmers of the sea isn’t likely to change.
When U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer was asked if Trump is considering providing other sectors assistance similar to the $12 billion taxpayer funded hand out to the agriculture sector, he replied, “Not at this time. No.”
There have been two major trade actions with China that affect Alaska seafood. On July 6, China implemented a retaliatory tariff of 25 percent on U.S. seafood sent to the Chinese domestic market. China purchases 54 percent of Alaska’s seafood exports, valued at $1.3 billion in 2017.
Then on July 10 Trump escalated his trade war by proposing an additional 10 percent tariff on seafood exported from China to the U.S. It includes $2.7 billion in American-caught seafood, mostly from Alaska, that is reprocessed in China into fillets and breaded portions and sent back to the U.S. for distribution. That tax is scheduled to go into effect in early September.
In the short term, the Alaska seafood industry may see greater impact from that tariff, according to Alexa Tonkovich, executive director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.
ASMI plans to comment on the proposed tariff to trade representatives before the Aug. 17 deadline.
“We encourage other industry members that will be affected by these tariffs to also comment and voice concern,” Tonkvich said in a statement.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Alaska’s salmon fisheries continue to lag alarmingly in several regions, with overall catches down by a third from the same time last year.
The single exception is at the unconquerable Bristol Bay, where a catch of 39 million sockeye so far has single-handedly pushed Alaska’s total salmon harvest towards a lackluster 60 million fish.
It’s too soon to press the panic button and there is lots of fishing left to go, but fears are growing that Alaska’s 2018 salmon season will be a bust for most fishermen. Worse, it comes on the heels of a cod crash and tanking halibut markets (and catches).
State salmon managers predicted that Alaska’s salmon harvest this year would be down by 34 percent to 149 million fish; due to an expected decline of pinks.
But with the exception of Bristol Bay, nobody expected fishing to be this bad.
Catches of sockeye, the big money fish, are off by millions at places like Copper River, Chignik and Kodiak, which has had the weakest sockeye harvest in nearly 40 years.
The weekly update by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute said that coho and chinook catches remain slow, and while it is still way early in the season, the “bread and butter” pink harvests are off by 65 percent from the strong run of two years ago.
Chums are proving to be some fishermen’s best friends again, following last year’s record 25 million haul. While fishing is 40 percent behind last year’s pace, catches are strong at Prince William Sound and in the Arctic regions.
Kotzebue is readying for a top 10 chum catch and some of the best salmon news comes from Norton Sound, where chums and pinks have buyers scrambling to keep up with the fish.
“Pink salmon have overrun the Sound again this year,” wrote veteran Jim Menard for the state’s weekly salmon updates at his Alaska Department of Fish and Game office in Nome.
He added that several part-timers were hired this summer to help keep counts at the weirs passing pinks.
“While it’s not quite combat fishing there are big crowds, especially kids at Nome River beach mouth, pulling in pinks nearly every cast,” Menard said.
He added that sockeyes also are showing up strong enough to “create another caravan of vehicles heading out of Nome to seine and gillnet sockeyes in the river.”
Into the void
Salmon customers at home and abroad were poised to take all the wild Alaska salmon they could get going into the season. Demand was strong, and despite Alaska fishermen catching over a billion pounds of salmon last year, there were no big carryovers in freezers. A lower U.S. dollar value also had increased interest by European buyers.
Competing farmed fish prices also have remained high all year and that sector has wasted no time filling any Alaska salmon void.
Imports of fresh whole and filleted farmed salmon to the U.S., especially from Chile, are at all-time highs with fillets topping 140 million pounds through May, an increase of nearly 14 percent. Market analyst Janice Schreiber of Urner Barry said farmed salmon pricing also is “exceeding three-year averages.”
Market reports also said that Norway is sending record amounts of its farmed salmon to China. Chinese buyers are turning their backs on Alaska salmon made more expensive by Trump’s 25 percent import tariff that went into effect July 6.
Salmon grows greens
Salmon is now being grown in the nation’s first landlocked fish farm on 720 acres in rural Northfield, Wis.
Over the July Fourth holiday a company called Superior Fresh sent its first batch of 20,000 pounds of fresh, 10-pound Atlantic salmon to Festival Food stores across the state.
Plans call for an annual output of about 72 tons of salmon and steelhead trout from the “fish house” which adjoins a huge greenhouse, making it the largest aquaponics facility in the world.
In the growing system, which uses no pesticides or antibiotics, water is drawn from two deep wells and feeds into a hydroponic set-up that produces 20,000 heads of lettuce every day. The water recirculates back to the fish tanks; the less than 1 percent of wastewater is used to irrigate alfalfa for hay production.
Wisconsinites hail the dual output as the future of environmental-controlled agriculture. Superior Fresh said it is “priming the pump” for fresh greens and fish to be sold year round in places where it wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
The East Coast has even bigger plans for the world’s largest land-based salmon growing business, minus the greenhouse.
Nordic Aquafarms of Norway hopes to soon break ground on 40 acres in Belfast, Maine, and eventually produce nearly 70 million pounds of Atlantic salmon annually.
The salmon will be grown in tanks holding up to 2 million gallons of recycling water that is sourced from a reservoir no longer used for the city’s water supply.
Nordic Aquafarm president Erik Heim said in media reports that the U.S. currently imports more than 80 percent of its seafood, and that raising salmon in Maine cuts shipping time and costs and delivers a fresher product to American customers.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

President Donald Trump’s trade war now includes tariffs on seafood going to and from China.
China is Alaska’s biggest seafood buyer purchasing 54 percent of Alaska seafood exports last year valued at $1.3 billion. On July 6 a 25 percent tariff went into effect on U.S. imports to China, including all Alaska salmon, pollock, cod, herring, flatfish, Dungeness crab, sablefish, geoduck clams and more.
Then on July 11 Trump added a 10 percent tariff on all seafood sent from China to the US.
According to market expert John Sackton of Seafoodnews.com, it includes products that are reprocessed in China and sent back for distribution in this country.
The total value of the 291 seafood products China sends to the U.S. each year is $2.75 billion. Sackton called the 10 percent tariff “a $275 million dollar direct tax on Americans.”
It will hit 70 percent of imports of frozen cod fillets. Likewise, 23 percent of all frozen salmon fillets come into the U.S. from China, including pink salmon that is reprocessed into salmon burgers and fillets.
Trade data show that China represents 47 percent of U.S. breaded shrimp imports and 37 percent of frozen squid imports. China also supplies 20 percent of the U.S. frozen scallop market.
Sackton said the economic hit will go far beyond the $275 million consumer tax.
“As sellers are forced to raise prices, competitive products from other countries will follow suit resulting in across the board seafood price increases. That will discourage seafood buying so sellers will lose business as customers back away,” he added.
China has been the fastest growing global market for high-end seafood. In late May, Gov. Bill Walker led a trade mission to China with several Alaska seafood companies which have spent millions to expand their brand even more.
“All this money will go up in smoke,” Sackton said.
In recent years, Alaska seafood sales to China have increased by millions of dollars through e-commerce activity, said Hannah Lindoff, international program director for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.
Lindhoff said ASMI will try to expand sales to other markets, such as Brazil, Spain and Ukraine. But, as Sackton points out, it is more expensive to mount campaigns in multiple countries than in a single large market like China.
ASMI operates on a shoestring international budget of less than $7 million per year, mostly from grants and federal dollars.
Its overall budget is about $22 million, nearly all from processor taxes.
Trump’s seafood tariffs come at a time when the Alaska legislature has zeroed out the state’s $1 million dollar contribution to ASMI.
Compare that to Norway’s more than $50 million marketing budget from a small tax on its seafood exports.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported on Thursday that “scant” American fish or shellfish was for sale at Jingshen, Beijing’s largest wholesale seafood market which supplies restaurants and grocers across China.
Several distributors said that the recent 25 percent tariff has made American seafood unaffordable. Unless Congress intervenes, the additional 10 percent will take effect in September. Alaska’s delegation has yet to comment.
Gearing up for crab
Boats already are signing up to participate in fall Bering Sea crab fisheries that begin Oct. 15. Meanwhile, many crabbers are still awaiting word on what their payouts are for last season.
Prior to the crab fisheries changing from “come one, come all” to a catch share form of management in 2005, prices were set before boats headed out, said Jake Jacobsen, director of the Inter-Cooperative Exchange which negotiates prices for most of the fleet.
“Since then the price is based on the historical division of revenues and there is a formula that is applied to sales. It takes a long time for sales to be completed to the point where we know or can predict what the final wholesale prices will be, and then we can apply the formula to it,” he explained.
Prices to fishermen were down a bit from last year but historically very high, Jacobsen said. For snow crab and bairdi Tanners, which typically are hauled up after the start of each year, prices were just settled and won’t be made public for another week.
“Most of the snow crab and bairdi prices were over $4 a pound, so that’s very good,” he hinted.
According to processor data, last season’s average snow crab price was $4.07 a pound; Tanner crab averaged $3.33. For golden king crab, fishermen averaged $5.51 per pound.
For Bristol Bay red king crab, the price averaged $9.20 a pound last year, down from the record $10.18 in 2016.
Heading into the fall, Jacobsen said the price outlook is good.
“We expect king crab to be very high this year. There is quite a bit of demand throughout the world and it’s in short supply,” he said, adding that a huge reduction in illegally caught crab imports from Russia has helped boost the market for Alaska crab.
Right now stakeholders are “on pins and needles” that crab stock surveys underway now will yield good news for the 2018-19 crab catches, which have been on a downward trend for several years.
“Based on last year’s surveys it looks like we might have another decline in snow crab and we’re not sure about red king crab as it was kind of on the margin last year,” Jacobsen said. “With Tanners, we never know. If we can get some good quotas it should be a good year,”
Last season’s catch limit for Bristol Bay red king crab was 6.6 million pounds, down 20 percent. For golden king crab the quota has remained stable at 6.3 million pounds. The snow crab catch quota at 19 million pounds was a 12 percent decline.
For bairdi Tanners, a catch of just 2.5 million pounds was down from over 20 million pounds two years prior.
The combined value of the 2017/2018 Bering Sea crab fisheries was nearly $190 million at the Alaska docks.
Fish prices
The first thing any fisherman wants to know is what he’s getting paid for his catch.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game provides dock prices for nearly every fish species with comparisons going back to 1984 in its Commercial Operator’s Annual Report, or COAR, compiled from inputs by Alaska processors.
Here’s a sampler of some of the average prices from 2017:
The price for cod was 32 cents per pound, an increase of 4 cents from 2016. The lingcod price averaged $1.88, up 33 cents.
Those 3 billion pounds of Alaska pollock fetched 12 cents per pound for fishermen, down a penny. Herring also dropped a penny to 11 cents.
Octopus averaged 60 cents per pound, a 14-cent increase; sea cucumbers fetched $5.02, up nearly a dollar.
For 11 types of flounders, pesky arrowtooth increased 3 cents to 10 cents per pound; rex sole held as the priciest flatfish at 34 cents. Alaska plaice was the cheapest at 3 cents per pound.
For 20 types of rockfish, yellow eye (red snapper) topped the list at $1.49, up 20 cents.
Geoduck clams paid out at $6.27, down 32 cents. Longnose skates fetched 49 cents, up a nickel.
Halibut averaged $6.25, an increase of 19 cents per pound. Sablefish averaged $7.36 compared to $6.50 the year before.
Sockeye salmon averaged $1.26, up 20 cents. At $5.73, chinook salmon increased from $4.88; cohos at $1.23 were up a nickel, chums at 70 cents increased by 8 cents, and pinks at 36 cents per pound dropped a penny.
The priciest Alaska catch was spot shrimp paying out at $9.32, up 36 cents. Sculpins were the cheapest at one penny a pound.
Another report shows how much each fishery produced and what processors sold it for.
Alaska pollock topped them all with 1.3 billion pounds processed for a first wholesale value of $1.5 billion.
Sockeye salmon was second at nearly $790 million for 208 million pounds.
Why should all Alaskans care about fish prices? With annual catches coming in at 5 billion to 6 billion pounds per year, adding just one penny per pound to the total catch makes a difference of nearly $1 million dollars in landing taxes for the state and local governments each.
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Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Sockeye salmon catches often add up to half of the value of Alaska’s total salmon fishery, and the so-called reds dominate the season’s early fisheries starting in mid-May.
But sockeye catches so far range from record-setting highs at Bristol Bay to record lows nearly everywhere else.
For example, the Copper River sockeye harvest of just 26,000 is the lowest in 50 years. At Kodiak just 212,000 sockeyes were taken through July 6, making it the weakest harvest in 38 years. Sockeye fishing at Yakutat has been closed due to the lowest returns in 50 years; likewise, fishermen at Chignik also have yet to see an opener.
Sockeye harvest levels at Cook Inlet and the Alaska Peninsula also are running well below average.
Fishery scientists suspect the downturns are due to the warmest sea-surface temperatures ever recorded running from 2014-16, which likely depleted food sources before the sockeyes returned from the ocean this year as adults.
At the other extreme, the early sockeye run at Bristol Bay set records for some of the best catches ever. By July 6 fishermen at the Nushagak district had four harvests that topped 1 million reds per day, including a record 1.77 million fish taken on July 1.
Salmon trackers
Anyone can easily track Alaska’s daily and weekly salmon catches with two free sources.
The Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game’s “Blue Sheet” updates salmon catches daily for every Alaska region from May through September. Through June 6 it showed that just over 22.2 million salmon had been taken so far: 16.5 million sockeyes, nearly 5 million chums, 91,000 chinook, 8,000 coho and 636,000 pink salmon.
ADFG also provides a weekly in-season summary and catch tally by region. The harvests are graphed to show the progression of catches for the fishing season, with comparisons to the previous year and 5-year averages. The timing charts can be customized by region, area, district or fishery and all five salmon species.
Another Alaska salmon source is the harvest summary done weekly by the McDowell Group for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. It also shows catches by species and region with comparisons to the previous year’s catch.
As of July 5 the summary showed that the pace of Alaska’s salmon harvest was about 25 percent below the same time last year, an improvement from the previous week. Sign up for the summary by contacting Garret Evridge at [email protected]
Fish watch
Lots of fishing is going on besides salmon all summer across Alaska.
Cod, pollock, flounders and other whitefish are being hauled in from the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea.
The Dungeness crab fishery in Southeast is ongoing with a summer harvest pegged at 2.25 million pounds.
A red king crab fishery is underway at Norton Sound with a limit of 290,282 pounds.
Golden king crab along the Aleutians opens Aug. 1 with a 6.3 million pound harvest.
Lingcod fisheries continue in portions of Prince William Sound and the Panhandle. Shrimp fisheries also are ongoing in both regions.
Scallop fisheries opened across Alaska on July 1 with a total take of 265,000 pounds of shucked meats.
The Dutch Harbor food and bait herring fishery opened July 1 with a catch quota set at 1,810 tons.
For halibut, 47 percent of Alaska’s 17 million-pound catch has been taken so far with less than 9 million pounds remaining. For sablefish, about 15 million pounds are left in the nearly 26 million-pound quota. Both fisheries run through Nov. 7.
In other fish news: the Alaska Board of Fisheries will hold a special meeting on July 17 in Anchorage to address several emergency management petitions, including hatchery production in Prince William Sound, sockeye failures at Chignik, Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula, and gillnet chum fishing on the Yukon.
Finally, Trump’s trade war with Alaska’s top seafood buyer, China, went into effect on July 6.
A 25 percent tariff will be imposed on Chinese imports of Alaska salmon, pollock, cod, herring, flatfish, Dungeness crab, sablefish, geoduck clams, mackerel and more. That’s on top of existing tariffs ranging from 5 to 15 percent.
China purchased 54 percent of Alaska’s seafood exports last year valued at $1.3 billion.
Ferry science
The state ferry Columbia now has more than six months of data since it began testing the waters for acidity last fall from Southeast Alaska across British Columbia to Bellingham, Wash.
The weekly testing is part of an unprecedented Alaska-Canada collaboration to learn how increasing ocean acidity affects regional fisheries.
“Nowhere in the world is there a ferry system that’s outfitted with CO2 sensors running that scale of a transit. It is really exciting,” said Wiley Evans, the technical lead for Canada’s Hakai Institute who rigged the 418-foot ferry to suck up water samples while it is underway.
The samples are measured automatically for oxygen, temperature, salinity and carbon dioxide, which indicates the acidity of the water.
“We’re trying to understand the time and space patterns in surface ocean CO2 chemistry near shore. In this area, it’s extremely data-poor, Evans said.”
The project aims to discover how ocean acidity levels change seasonally, and where there are hot spots or refuges from corrosive waters.
Off kilter oean chemistry makes it hard for marine creatures — and the micro-organisms they feed on — to form shells, among other things. The ferry information can help scientists estimate the rate at which acidification is occurring in near-shore waters.
Preliminary ferry data point to an extremely variable seascape in which the surface water is primarily corrosive in fall and winter, representing the most vulnerable time of year for species sensitive to ocean acidity.
When spring arrives, two primary factors create a change: the phytoplankton bloom removes CO2 from the water through photosynthesis, and the water gets warmer making conditions more favorable for shell production.
The Columbia data is uploaded daily to the Alaska Ocean Acidification Network website. Major studies show the southeast and southwest regions of the Gulf of Alaska will take the hardest economic hits from increasingly acidic waters.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Shockwaves rocked the Alaska seafood industry when China announced on June 15 that it will add an additional 25 percent tariff on seafood imports starting July 6 in retaliation to tariffs set by President Donald Trump.
“The 25 percent will be added to the current base tariffs which typically range from 5 to 15 percent,” said Garrett Evridge, a fishery analyst with the McDowell Group.
The list of seafood products includes all Alaska salmon, pollock, cod, herring, flatfish, Dungeness crab, snow crab, Atka mackerel, sablefish, geoduck clams and more.
“This is devastating news,” said Frances Leach, executive director of United Fishermen of Alaska, which represents 34 groups. “The tariff will not just impact commercial fishermen but will also affect the more than 60,000 individuals who are employed by the state’s fishing industry.”
China has been Alaska’s top seafood customer since 2011, purchasing 54 percent of all seafood exports valued at $1.3 billion in 2017.
The bulk of Alaska’s fish harvests go to China for reprocessing before they are sent to customers around the world. Those also will be subject to the 25 percent tariff, said market expert John Sackton of SeafoodNew.com.
“China has become the de facto export destination for virtually all seafood reprocessing done overseas. The cost of these tariffs will slam the seafood industry, because ultimately there is little choice but to continue to send these products to China,” he said. “So through no fault of our own, most companies will see a big hit to their bottom line because they will have to agree to lower prices in order to maintain marketability in the face of this 25 percent increase in costs.”
“This represents the worst outcome feared by the industry,” Sackton added. “The Chinese are deliberately targeting smaller industries that have little ability to fight back.”
Candidates mostly pan Pebble
Five candidates for Alaska governor met up at the Bristol Bay Fish Expo in Naknek last week. The debate focused on a wide range of topics affecting rural Alaska, including two hot fish issues.
Naknek is the hub of the world’s largest sockeye salmon run at Bristol Bay, which also is at the heart of the proposed plans for the Pebble Mine.
Gov. Bill Walker said emphatically that he is not in favor of the Pebble mine.
“I had an interesting discussion with a group that said it can be done safely. My response was ‘what if it doesn’t?’ Look at all that is at risk. I am very pro-development and pro-mining but not in that location,” Walker said.
Mead Treadwell, a Republican candidate from Anchorage, said he will not trade one resource for another.
As a former deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, Treadwell said he helped write state water quality standards.
“If this mine cannot meet the kind of water quality and habitat protection standards that we have created to protect our fisheries, then it won’t happen,” he stated.
“From what I’ve seen it is going to be very hard for Pebble to make it through the process…But it makes sense to have a strong public process where we get to analyze what is happening,” Treadwell added.
Republican candidate Scott Hawkins of Anchorage said the mine has the legal right to go through the permitting process, but that it “very well may be the wrong mine in the wrong place because if anything goes wrong, there is just so much at stake.”
“I think the mine is losing momentum,” Hawkins added. “All the big investors have decided that it just doesn’t work on several levels. A lot of it is just how controversial it is to the people in this region and that is hurting the mining industry.”
Mark Begich, a Democrat from Anchorage, has long touted the “wrong mine/wrong place” meme, which was first stated years ago by former Sen. Ted Stevens.
“When people say they are against it, they should be against it all the way,” Begich said. “The first thing I would do as governor would be to immediately make sure the Corps of Engineers knows that state land or state right of way or state access would not be part of their plans or participate in any way. I believe that would finally put an end to this project and end the divisiveness it has caused throughout all of Alaska. This issue is like Groundhog Day, it never goes away and just keeps coming back.”
Mike Dunleavy, a Republican candidate from Wasilla, was more equivocal saying it was difficult for him to answer until Pebble goes through the study process.
“Once we can examine that data, then I think a final decision can be made,” Dunleavy said, adding that if the mine is going to endanger fisheries or other resources in the area, “I think we all should be against it.”
“I do think there is a danger in politicizing this study process that we have. In the end, if it is not a good project we shouldn’t have it permitted.”
No backers for salmon initiative
The Stand for Salmon initiative that aims to update habitat protections for the first time since statehood could go before voters in November. But the measure has little support from the gubernatorial candidates.
“While I don’t support it, I certainly understand that local input is critical in the process,” said Walker.
“I believe the reason we have Stand for Salmon is because the Coastal Zone Management Program died in the 2011 legislative session and that took away local input into the development process,” Walker added. “I think this is what happens when you take away input by the people: you meet them at a ballot initiative or you meet them in the court room and I think that is unfortunate.”
Treadwell also said he does not support the salmon initiative.
“This bill essentially assumes that every stream is anadromous when it’s not. This would take away your property rights without protecting the fish,” Treadwell said. “Do I stand for salmon and believe we need to protect salmon? Absolutely. I don’t think this is the right law to do it.”
Hawkins said the “devil is in the details” and he believes the ballot initiative would have a lot of unintended consequences and “shut down a lot of things in this state.”
“It’s not that our permitting process couldn’t do with some tightening up,” Hawkins added. “We need to have a process that knows how to say no. Just because you apply for a permit should not mean that at the end of the day you are going to get it. We need a very stringent permitting system that holds projects to very high standards, but I don’t think the initiative is the way we get there.”
Dunleavy echoed those sentiments.
“I believe there are a number of projects throughout the state that could be at risk. This is a resource state and we need to develop our resources,” Dunleavy said. “We need to do it responsibly and I think the projects should be reviewed separately and held to a permitting and processing standard. I just don’t think an initiative such as Stand for Salmon is good for Alaska.”
Begich said he will take a position when a state court rules on the constitutionality of the salmon ballot initiative.
“At that point I will make a decision. But I will say that the laws should be revamped and reviewed and that has not been done,” Begich said.
“This is a clear symbol of what’s broken in Juneau,” he added. “When you have almost 50,000 Alaskans bring forward an initiative, you have to respect their views and figure out how to fix this problem and make sure our salmon preserved for generations to come.”
The entire debate is posted at KTVA’s website.
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Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.

Plastics in recycled fishing nets are being used to make an amazing array of products around the globe and Alaska plans to get in on the action.
An Alaska Net Hack Challenge is being planned for Sept. 8 and 9 that aims to identify potential opportunities for using the tons of old nets piled up in landfills and storage lots across the state and develop new items from the materials. Fishing nets can weigh from 5,000 to 20,000 pounds each.
“The purpose of the program is to change how people look at fishing nets and ropes. Instead of looking at them as waste materials, hopefully, they will start seeing them as a valuable resource and materials they can use in a different way,” said Nicole Baker, a former fisheries observer and founder of www.netyourproblem.com.
Baker spearheaded a project last summer in Dutch Harbor that collaborated with the local fishing industry and Global Ghost Gear Initiative to ship nearly 240,000 pounds, or about 40 nets, to a company called Plastix in Denmark where they were melted down, pelletized and resold to manufacturers of plastic products.
“Socks are being made from recycled fishing nets, water bottles, cell phone cases, carpets, bathing suits, sneakers, sunglasses, skateboards, rugs, bowls, even 3-D printing and injection molds. People are becoming so creative about finding ways to reuse these plastic products,” Baker said.
The Alaska Net Hack Challenge is based on the Circular Ocean program in the U.K. and Iceland that “aims to inspire enterprises and entrepreneurs to realize the hidden opportunities in discarded fishing nets.”
Along with Baker, the two-day events are being organized in Anchorage by the Alaska Ocean Cluster Initiative, or AOCI, and by Brian Himelbloom, a retired University of Alaska seafood specialist in Kodiak.
“We will dump a bunch of waste nets and rope in the middle of a room and encourage artists, students, designers, business owners, engineers, recyclers and others to take the materials and design products out of it,” Baker explained, adding that Arctic Wire and Rope of Anchorage and gear manufacturers in Seattle are providing supplies for the Anchorage challenge, whereas Kodiak has plenty of “end of life” nets to offer.
“On the first day we will show presentations about the context and scale of the issue, the type of materials available, and some products and business models that have been implemented already to get people’s gray matter warmed up,” she added. “On the second day, teams will get together and use the material and design a prototype that will be presented to the judges to get their feedback.”
Judges will score the projects on creativity, usefulness and scalability and follow the development over six months.
Video conferencing also will be available so that other interested communities can have a guideline on organizing Net Hack Challenges in their fishing towns.
The ultimate hope is that some of the prototype projects will become commercially viable through the AOCI’s Blue Economy push that helps develop products to their final stages.
The Alaska Net Hack Challenge is in its early organizational stage and a website and social media where people can register will be up and running in a few weeks, said AOIC director Joel Cladouhos. In the interim, emails to [email protected] will serve as the contact point.
Meanwhile, later this month Nicole Baker will be back in Dutch Harbor and also at St. Paul to collect more nets and give them new life in different useful forms.
“My goal is to fill more than seven container loads and top least year’s take,” she said.
BS/AI booming
In Alaska’s fisheries, the regions of Southeast, Cook Inlet, Bristol Bay and Kodiak attract the most attention. But it turns out that the more far-flung and remote areas provide some of the state’s biggest fish bucks — notably, the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands regions, called BS/AI.
A new McDowell Group report measured the statewide economic impacts of shoreside processing operations in Dutch Harbor, Saint Paul, King Cove, Sand Point, False Pass, and other small communities based on an average of 2015 and 2016 harvests and production.
It turns out that approximately 30 percent of the seafood industry’s total economic impact in Alaska can be attributed to BS/AI inshore processing and related fishing activity, adding up to nearly $1.6 billion in 2016.
Forty-four percent of all seafood processing wages paid in Alaska stemmed from that region, totaling almost $440 million. And a whopping 56 percent of all fish taxes paid in Alaska, including Fisheries Business Tax and taxes levied by local governments, totaled nearly $60 million.
Unalaska/Dutch Harbor, with a population of about 4,300, is the largest community in the region and has been the top seafood port in the U.S. by volume for more than 20 years. Forty-seven percent of the town’s workers were employed in seafood processing.
All other BS/AI communities have fewer than 1,000 residents. The seasonality and huge volumes of seafood require bringing in workers from elsewhere, but the proportion of Alaska residents on the job in the BS/AI has increased from 17 to 24 percent since 2006.
The Economic impact of inshore seafood processing in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands Region was produced for Icicle Seafoods Peter Pan Seafoods Trident Seafoods UniSea, Westward and Alyeska Seafoods.
Crab shell creations
The young Tidal Vision entrepreneurs of Juneau continue to expand their line of “upcycled” products made from a crab shell extract called chitosan.
An all-natural solution called High Tide enhances plant growth by triggering the natural immune response that results in larger and hardier crops.
“In different plants that means increased yield or sap production, and increased likelihood of plants surviving fungal infections,” said Craig Kasburg, Tidal Vision president, adding that High Tide has been tested on a variety of plants from turf to trees.
“It helps to revive stressed trees that are grown in nurseries, such as those that are transported or subjected to a sudden drop in temperature. It has increased their survival rate,” he said. “It also increases the size of berries and tomato plants and decreases the number that die of disease.”
High Tide also has produced similar results in the growing of marijuana.
“We did trials with over 500 cannabis growers and found the same results,” Kasburg said. “By increasing the sap production, it increased the essential oils and the THC and CBD, everything that makes cannabis valuable.”
A crab shell infused spray called Game Meat Protector also is being sold to hunters that protects meat from spoiling and being infested by insects.
“It’s simply water, chitosan, and citric acid,” Kasberg said. “When it’s applied it leaves a thin film on the game meat. Because of chitosan’s natural anti-microbial properties and the low pH citric acid, it acts as a preservative and protects the quality of the game meat. It also prevents bugs and insects from landing and burrowing into it.”
“It is sort of an insurance policy for hunters,” he added. “When hunting deep in the backcountry there is always a risk of bad weather or other things that can cause a delay. Having a natural way to preserve the quality of the meat as it is being harvested is an important step for hunters.”
One eight-ounce bottle is enough to cover an entire large game animal and it can also be sprayed on game bags for extra protection. Purchase Game Meat Protector at Amazon and other outdoor outlets, as well as at the Tidal Vision website.
You’ll also find sponges, beverage fining agents, pool clarifiers and more — all originating from Alaska crab shells.
Laine Welch lives in Kodiak. Visit www.alaskafishradio.com or contact [email protected] for information.